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UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 



MAX EASTMAN 

Formerly of the faculty of Philosophy 
and Psychology at Columbia University 

Editor of the masses 

Author of 

ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 

CHILD OF THE AMAZONS AND OTHER POEMS 



UNDERSTANDING 
GERMANY 

THE ONLY WAY TO END 
WAR 

AND OTHER ESSAYS 
BY 

MAX EASTMAN 




NEW YORK 

MITCHELL KENNERLEY 

1916 






COPYRIGHT I916 BY 
MITCHELL KENNERLEY 



MAR 17 1917 



PRINTED IN AMERICA 



7U 



Some of these essays have been published 
in magazines: Understanding Germany in 
Harper's Weekly, The Anti-German Hate 
in The Forum, A Note on Nietzsche in 
Everybody's, What is Patriotism? in The 
Survey, The Only Way to End War, Two 
Kinds of War, and The Uninteresting War 
in The Masses, and War Psychology and In- 
ternational Socialism in The Masses Review. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Preface ix 

PART I 

The Anti-German Hate 1 

Understanding Germany 44 

On Characterizing Nations 57 

A Note on Nietzsche 60 

Something to Hate 69 

TART II 

The Only Way to End War 77 

What Is Patriotism and What Shall 

We Do With It? 98 
The Business Cost of War 113 
War Psychology and International So- 
cialism 122 
Pacifists 138 
Two Kinds of War 140 
The Uninteresting War, a news story 

from europe 144 
vii 



PREFACE 

TO me the latter half of this book is the 
more important. Any one with a 
habit of withdrawing once in a while from 
the current of newspaper emotion might 
have said a few sensible words about Ger- 
many. And that is all I think I have done. 
But what I have said about War and Pa- 
triotism may have a special value in that I 
do not myself feel patriotic to any country. 
My sense of solidarity seems to attach to the 
human race as a whole, or to those classes in 
every country who are struggling towards 
liberty. I can not, of course, forejudge what 
might happen to my emotions if the country 
in which I function as a citizen were threat- 
ened by hostile forces. The abstract proba- 
bility is that I should rationalize my instinc- 
tive loyalty, and appear, as most of the in- 
ternationalists of Europe did, with some 



x PREFACE 

elaborate moral or metaphysical justifica- 
tion for being on my own side of the fight. I 
hope not. But however that may be, I can 
truthfully say up to the present moment that 
I am not a national patriot. My altruism, 
when it operates, is too generous to wish to 
love a group with any boundary lines around 
it; and my egotism is too arrant to identify 
itself with anything but itself. It seems to 
me, moreover, a kind of betrayal of the ideals 
of intelligence for a man to accept the acci- 
dent of his birth and take his vision of the 
universe from the little valley where fortune 
dropped him. The man without a country 
is the only one who is able to think clearly 
and love truth no matter what occasions 
arise, and he is the man whose elevation I 
envy. 

Perhaps this confession will give a spe- 
cial value of aloofness to my analysis of 
the emotions of patriotism, and my con- 
clusions as to how they ought to be handled. 
I have brought to the task the equipment of 
a psychologist, and not of a student of poli- 



PREFACE xi 

tics or history. I must ask the forbearance 
of those who are learned in these sciences, 
and in my own science I must pay respects 
at every point to William McDougall (of 
the Allies) and Sigmund Freud (of the 
Central Empires). 

Max Eastman. 



PART ONE 
UNDERSTANDING GERMANY; 



THE ANTI-GERMAN HATE 

WHEN there is a fight on, every one 
has an enemy. Our instinctive pug- 
nacity is so strong. We can not even view 
a tennis-match, but our partisanship, tak- 
ing its rise from the color of a shirt, grows 
hotter and more convinced with every crack 
at the ball. Neutrality may be possible to 
a few highly concentrated cerebrums, but 
to the general nervous system of mankind 
it is simply an alien condition. We were 
foredoomed to take sides. 

And also we were foredoomed to hate. 
For it is the fashion of our nature, when- 
ever any of its own precious desires are 
blocked, to flash into an angry response; 
and when the blockage of these desires is 
general and continual, that anger inevit- 
ably concentrates itself upon some object 

for the mere sake of relief. — And who is 

l 



2 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

there, whose desire or passionate hope has 
not somewhere been blocked by this catas- 
trophe of universal war? 

The truth is that even in times of tran- 
quillity we are usually emptying our public 
venom upon some scapegoat. And we al- 
ways have been. Professor J. G. Frazer, 
in the later volumes of his "Golden 
Bough," a book which is a treasure-house 
of true fairy-stories, has set forth how all 
tribes in history have found indispensable 
to their spiritual ease and well-being some 
standardized villain, upon whom they could 
dump the sins and the dammed-up malice of 
the day and go on their way rejoicing. And 
the incidents which gave rise to the choice 
of that scapegoat were always quite dis- 
proportionate to the burden of crime and 
odium which he carried away.* 

* Periodically, Mr. Frazer tells us, in spring or at the beginning 
of the calendar year — as a kind of public New Year's resolution 
— the powers of a community would single out some person, object, 
animal or spirit, symbolically load upon his conspicuous shoulders 
all the ills of the tribe, and then (not symbolically) "beat him 
up," drown him, slide him down hill, run him over the border, or 
scatter his blood to the winds. And not only periodically, but also 
upon special occasions of misfortune — the incidence of war, plague, 
famine, domestic trouble in the royal family, and so forth — the 
same happy purgative was resorted to. It seemed easy and natural. 

Mr. Frazer is contented to interpret these customs, just in the 



THE ANTI-GERMAN HATE 3 

It is a pity Mr. Frazer's interest is so 
absorbed by the past and the primitive, for 
it would be interesting to compile a list of 
the notable scapegoats of modern society. 
In America especially, where the newspa- 
pers have made possible so wide a solidarity 
of feeling, we are always unanimously an- 
gry at something. A national scapegoat 
is one of the conventional properties of a 
newspaper office. A year or two ago it was 
the I. W. W. against whom all our rage 
was expended, both in general and upon the 
falling of any new calamity. To-day it is 
the "Emissaries of the Kaiser," "Teutonic 
spies," "Hyphenated Americans" within 
our borders; and in the world at large, an 
imaginary ogre called "Germany," upon 
whom the nation as a whole is entitled to 

way they are narrated, as an effort to "transfer evil," or "misfor- 
tune," upon some one object or person, so that the tribe as a whole 
may be relieved. He calls them "an endless number of unamiable 
devices for palming off upon some one else the trouble which a man 
shrinks from bearing himself." But with a little admixture of 
modern psychology, it becomes simple to interpret them and under- 
stand their universal value, not so much as a transference of mis- 
fortune, but as a transference of the hate which misfortune en- 
genders. _ It is not a mythical relief from bad luck, but a real relief 
from raging at bad luck that makes them so popular. Something 
has hurt us, and we want to "go out and lick somebody." And 
the more our culture denies us this privilege, compels us to repress 
these baby-rages into the unconscious, the more eagerly they burst 
through any vent which is still allowed. 



4 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

spit as often as it wants to and feel relieved. 
There are important causes why Ger- 
many, and not some other nation, became 
the object of this wartime hate. Let us 
weigh and count these causes. But let us 
first remember that it is a habit of our 
species to take sides and in times of trou- 
ble to unite in hating somebody, and that 
we are now in the most stupendous trou- 
ble that has befallen our species. We shall 
perhaps discover then that our hatred 
against Germany, though natural, is not 
rationally justified because its causes were, 
in a large sense, accidental. 



GUILT AND INNOCENCE 

THE first thing that directed our feel- 
ing against Germany was the conduct 
of her government after the war-threat 
arose. No one knows much about this. 
Those in a position to know are emotion- 
ally incapable of knowledge. But most of 



THE ANTI-GERMAN HATE 5 

us who are capable, have acquired a dis- 
tinct impression that Germany was ready 
to fight, and England aching to avoid it, 
from the first note of trouble. France too 
wished to avoid fighting. And Russia 
seemed to try, although we have no cer- 
tainty that she did not, as Berlin asserts, 
threaten with her mobilization first. I think 
the wisest Germans admit, however, that 
Germany was more ready to fight than the 
others. Only they do not stop with the ad- 
mission; they proceed to tell us why. And 
after they have told us, if we listen with a 
liberal mind, we find ourselves acquiring a 
reasonable human sympathy toward their 
government without blinking the official re- 
ports of its diplomatic conduct. 

The opinion this conduct gave rise to in 
America was that Germany, or her ruling 
classes at least, had "a chip on their shoul- 
ders." I think this is false to their mood. 
I do not believe that anybody, who is not 
subject to the anti-German obsession, can 
long continue in that belief. Granted that 



6 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

their ruling-class is predominantly feudal 
— the war they would wage and that would 
be waged against them was not feudal, and 
they knew that. Few German princes had 
anything personal to gain in the devasta- 
tion of Europe. It was loss from the begin- 
ning. And little as I esteem the conduct 
of human beings when they are in a position 
of supreme power, I am not able to imagine 
that the whole dominant class in Germany 
was inflated with a Pan-German military 
megalomania, to such an extent that they 
could not conceive a world-war to be some- 
thing of the general hell it is. No, the re- 
sponsible people in Germany, the people 
with national cares on them, were not in the 
mood of the chip-on-your-shoulder. That is 
a part of our phantasm. Their mood was 
that they were at bay. 

A military nation diplomatically at bay, 
is what responsible Germany conceived her- 
self to be in the period preceding the war. 
That is why she was so well prepared; that 
is why she was so touchy and unresponsive 



THE ANTI-GERMAN HATE 7 

to Minister Grey's overtures. Her "pug- 
nacity centres" were inflamed, not as one 
who struts the fence, but as one who sees 
or conceives herself to be surrounded. We 
can not say to what extent she was justified 
in this, for we know next to nothing about 
European diplomacy — next to the nothing 
the diplomats know. But we can be sure 
that this was her mood. 

Germany contributed the larger share of 
the immediate causes of war. But who con- 
tributed the larger share of the remote 
causes, the diplomatic conditions which 
brought Germany into that state of pug- 
nacity? Is not this an important question? 
And yet the great book of British justifi- 
cation, "Ordeal by Battle," fails altogether 
to apprehend the existence of such a ques- 
tion. It merely assumes that the policies 
English nationalism was compelled to adopt 
for its own glory, were and are and always 
will be, not right indeed or wrong, but sim- 
ply unquestionable. Upon the argument of 
that book alone, what it assumes and what it 



8 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

so calmly fails to say, we might almost base 
the assertion that it is the British govern- 
ment that contributed the larger share of 
remote causes, of diplomatic conditions, to 
the engendering of a world war. 

All nations have their stereotyped ego- 
tisms: we, our Monroe Doctrine — an as- 
tounding piece of sophomoric cheek; Eng- 
land, her "Mistress of the Seas" tradition, 
which but for its age and origin in a state 
of actual fact, would appear — what it is — 
a monumental swagger. Spain made the 
same swagger in her time, and Holland in 
hers. France too had her precocious demen- 
tia, her vision of forcing down the throats 
of Europe the one true and only liberty of 
man — under an emperor! But all nations 
fall from these grandiose attitudes, and all 
recover. England will have to recover from 
hers. And we, for our health and safety, 
will allow that Monroe Doctrine to grow 
up into an equal Union of the American 
Republics. Germany too has some de- 



THE ANTI-GERMAN HATE 9 

lusions to renounce — delusions of spiritu- 
ality and superior brains I think. 

But the point here is that this old, 
preposterous, self-assertion of England's 
seemed as preposterous to Germany as it 
really is, because Germany came on the 
scene late as a nation, and she was not ac- 
customed to it. Germany ventured to as- 
sert the equal importance of her own grandi- 
osity, not only in European politics, which 
were getting old-fashioned, but in world- 
politics, which seemed to be the politics of 
the future; and this not unreasonable as- 
sertion England met with suave, self-right- 
eous, self-contented inflexible persistence in 
her old established purpose and habit. Her 
policy of remaining commander of the seas, 
and commander of the commerce of the 
world, and of holding at any cost the balance 
of power in Europe, involved the strengthen- 
ing of France and Russia, and her alliance 
with them, to the detriment of Germany. 
This therefore was the general tenor of her 
foreign policy. 



10 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

All of which I learn from a British book 
— a book which establishes in an absolutely 
convincing manner the guilt of Germany 
and the innocence of England, because it 
never allows the preposterous assumptions 
of British diplomacy to become a subject 
of question.* Perhaps no British states- 
man ever said that Germany must not be 
allowed to become an equal power in the 
world with England, whether she naturally 
would become so or not. But what British 
statesmen ever failed to feel it? The newly 
asserted equality of Germany, against the 
traditionally assumed superiority of Eng- 
land, is what gave rise to the appearance of 
a more than usual megalomania in the Ger- 
man foreign policy. And the suave and 
self-righteous blow England directed against 
the equal status of Germany among world 
powers in the Agadir incident, was, as 
much as any act of any nation at any time, 
a cause of the present war. That is what 
is meant by the statement that while Ger- 

* "Ordeal by Battle," by F. S. Oliver. Macmillan. 



THE ANTI-GERMAN HATE 11 

many supplied most of the immediate causa- 
tion, England supplied most of the remote. 
Both their megalomanias were extreme 
enough to generate war. And though our 
superficial indignation inevitably arose 
against the one we saw strike the first blow, 
there was no durable reason in that for di- 
recting the volume of our hatred against 
Germany. 

II 

BELGIUM 

HER manner of initiating war was the 
second cause that turned us against 
Germany. She invaded France on a plea 
that Russia was invading her. And to the 
general American public this appeared alto- 
gether monstrous. Her violation of Bel- 
gian neutrality only completed the impres- 
sion this had already given of wanton ag- 
gression. We saw Germany suddenly con- 
vulsed, and laying about her in all direc- 
tions like a maniac, and this vision pre- 



12 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

pared us for the one-sided stories of atroc- 
ities and horrors which soon came along, 
through the news-service of the Allies, to 
convince us that Germans are not human 
beings at all, but "Huns" and "Northern 
Barbarians." 

Now the invasion of France, on the oc- 
casion of war with Russia, was not wanton 
— as it appeared to those unacquainted with 
the diplomatic map — but merely good mili- 
tary tactics. For France and Russia were 
one nation in the case of war with Germany. 
This was a general truth; and moreover, as 
the official papers showed, the French am- 
bassador had specifically confirmed it, prom- 
ising, before any hostilities began, uncondi- 
tional military support to Russia. So our 
impression in this matter was wrong. 

The invasion of Belgium, after she had 
refused passage to the German troops, was 
not an unusual act in war. The thing that 
was unusual at that time was war. And 
that is why this act seemed so horrible. Here 



THE ANTI-GERMAN HATE 13 

is the news item of a similar act two years 
after the war began: 

"The only available railway route is the 
Peloponnesian line via Athens. The Allies 
decided to use this railway for the transpor- 
tation of the Serbs, disembarking at Patras, 
but the Greek Government is offering strong 
opposition to the scheme. Premier Skou- 
loudis has flatly refused to give his official 
consent, whereupon he was informed that 
Greek official sanction was immaterial and 
the Allies would not permit Greek opposi- 
tion to interfere with their plan of opera- 
tions." 

This item is printed at the bottom of a 
news column of the New York Times; it 
does not even provoke a head-line. And 
yet in its essentials it is the same act — in- 
vading a neutral country the better to carry 
on war against an enemy. Violations of 
neutrality are no more exciting now than 
the going down of ships — because we have 
grown accustomed to the habits of war. 

Belgium is more near to us than Greece, 



14 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

near to the pathways of pleasure and profit 
which we have long regarded as our own to 
walk in, and this also increased our sensi- 
tiveness to her rights. In short, what made 
the invasion of Belgium more atrocious to 
us than war simply as war, was its posi- 
tion in time and space. And this atrocity 
was of course illumined with horror by the 
fact that Belgium stood up against her in- 
vaders, adding heroic deeds and blood and 
misery to her political humiliation. That 
was enough for the emotional moralists. All 
the righteous indignation that should have 
been launched against war and the causes of 
war was launched against "Germany," be- 
cause her generals were trained in the con- 
templation of war with an implacable can- 
dor that enabled them to wage war as it 
is, without waiting until they or the world 
got used to it. 

Whether the raw and brutal frankness 
of the German leaders, or the refined and 
tactful casuistry of the British, is the su- 
perior trait, is a point too fine for my code. 



THE ANTI-GERMAN HATE 15 

I am willing to let Greece and Belgium 
stand together, as they will stand in history, 
monuments of the ruthless logic of war. 

Ill 

ATROCITIES 

GERMANY is full of stories of atroci- 
ties — atrocities committed by Eng- 
lish, French, Russian, Serbian soldiers. 
And I suppose they are all true, for the 
reason that all these nations are human. I 
imagine that in the midst of battle, those 
amenities of culture with which men have 
adorned themselves have little influence 
upon their acts. Their behavior is instinc- 
tive rather than cultural. And average in- 
stinctive behavior is the same in the 
same races. It is possible that individuals 
of somewhat more cruel hardness have 
been elevated to command in the more con- 
sciously military nation; and it is pos- 
sible that the rigid discipline of the Ger- 
man private leaves him with less com- 



16 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

mand of himself when he is on the loose. 
What is not possible, however, is that a 
"German race" (which does not exist) is 
bestial and barbarous by comparison with a 
"British race" (which does not exist). 

All these reverend one-eyed commissions 
of investigation have established beyond a 
shadow of doubt that German soldiers com- 
mitted atrocities. But have they established 
that Allied soldiers did not? How foolish 
are the little children that public men be- 
come in time of war ! The atrocities of Eng- 
lish troops in South Africa a little time ago 
were the stench of the world. The behavior 
of our "boys" in the Philippines was in- 
credible to our pride. Ever since the ideal 
of human kindness extending beyond the 
tribe got hold of man's mind, it has been 
used in wartime to condemn the enemy and 
his friends as brutal. We have no worse 
opinion of the Kaiser than the South had 
of Sherman. A friend of mine visiting in 
Charleston only last month happened to 
mention at dinner the name of that gen- 



THE ANTI-GERMAN HATE 17 

eral, and one of the guests arose and left 
the table and the house, explaining to his 
hostess that he could not remain in a place 
where that name was spoken. 

The best thing General Sherman did was 
to tell the truth about war after he got 
through waging it. The Germans told the 
truth before they began. And this is the 
worst indictment that Mr. Oliver brings 
against them. He says: 

"I have not occupied myself with what 
are termed 'German atrocities.' So far as 
this matter is concerned, I am satisfied to 
let it rest for the present upon the German 
statement of intentions before war began, 
and upon the proclamations which have been 
issued subsequently." He then quotes these 
sentences from the German War Book 
issued by the General Staff: 

"A war conducted with energy can not 
be directed merely against the combatants of 
the enemy State and the positions they oc- 
cupy, but it will and must in like manner 
seek to destroy the total intellectual and 



18 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

material resources of the latter. Humani- 
tarian claims such as the protection of men 
and their goods, can only be taken into con- 
sideration in so far as the nature and ob- 
ject of the war permit. 

"International Law is in no way opposed 
to the exploitation of the crimes of third 
parties (assassination, incendiarism, robbery 
and the like) to the prejudice of the enemy. 
. . . The necessary aim of war gives the 
belligerent the right and imposes on him 
the duty, according to circumstances, the 
duty not to let slip the important, it may 
be the decisive advantages, to be gained by 
such means." 

Now if those words were incorporated in 
an abstract treatise upon war, every one in 
the civilized world would regard them as 
an understatement of the truth. As "Les- 
sons from the Occupation of Atlanta and 
the March to the Sea," they would have to 
be extended a little in places. As a press 
story from South Africa during the Boer 
War they would be inadequate and vague. 
But in the form of general statements of 



THE ANTI-GERMAN HATE 19 

truth in a War Book, Mr. Oliver finds them 
"criminal." * 

It may indeed be a step forward to feel, 
as English and American people seem to 
do, the necessity of lying to themselves about 
what they do when they go to war; but it 
is not one of those long evolutionary steps, 
like ceasing to do it. Let us not make that 
mistake. If the German invasion was any 
more attended with atrocity than an inva- 
sion by the Allies would be, it was not 
enough more to warrant our making it in the 
slightest degree a point of judgment be- 
tween the nations. 

IV 

THE LUSITANIA 

"\T ONE of these factors, indeed — the im- 
•^ ^ mediate initiation of a war whose 
principal causes were not immediate; the 

* Persons who like to exclaim over the atrocities of other na- 
tionalities, will find some nice ones recorded of our Civil War 
soldiers by Walt Whitman in his "Specimen Days," or they will 
find helpful reading in The Crisis which records the picturesque 
lynchings which characterize our own precious "nationality" in 



20 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

ruthlessly warlike manner of its initiation; 
the inevitable atrocities — none of these were 
adequate points of judgment against a na- 
tion. But with the help of Theodore Roose- 
velt, whose talent for hatred and ordinary 
vituperation is celebrated, and with the help 
of that suborner of prejudice, the American 
press, these factors had raised our anger 
against Germany long before the Lusitania 
went down. And after that happened the 
fixation was complete. It seemed that hard- 
ly a handful of neutrals was left in the 
United States who could see and state the 
aspect which that event will have in his- 
tory. 

History will have to begin by a recital of 
England's perpetration of a blockade pol- 
icy against Germany, which openly violated 
the rules of international law, and her boast 
that this policy would reduce Germany to 
submission. History will not trouble to con- 
demn this policy, which was but a forceful 
employment by England of the strongest 

times of complete peace. The average number of people lynched in 
this country since 1885 is one every four days. 



THE ANTI-GERMAN HATE 21 

weapon she had — her navy. History knows 
that international law is abrogated in every 
war where obedience to it means defeat.* 
But after this policy of England's has been 
recorded, the record of Germany's retaliat- 
ing with the only naval weapon she had left 
— the submarine — and this also in violation 
of international law, will not seem out- 
rageous. History will be aware that under 
the same circumstances England or America 
would have done the same thing, and, like 
Germany, would have regarded a formal ex- 
tension of the war-zone as a sufficient warn- 
ing to travelling neutrals. It would have 
been a sufficient warning to sympathetic 
neutrals. Even to the American public, in- 
deed, that declaration by Germany, in its 
abstract form, did not seem very terrible. 
We thought of merchant crews and incon- 
spicuous travellers on freight-boats as hav- 
ing to "take their chances." We were still 



* Mr. H. Sidebothom in a volume of articles by British authors, 
called "Towards a Lasting Settlement," makes the extremest effort 
to convict Germany of the first violation of maritime law; but even 
he has to acknowledge that England had abrogated the rights guaran- 
teed to neutrals "in one particular." 



22 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

too innocent of war's reality to imagine it 
could apply to saloon passengers who had 
paid their fare on the great Atlantic liners. 
Their voyages were like the rotation of the 
earth, established of God. To blow them up 
would not be war — it would be sacrilege and 
horror ! Such was our innocence — as though 
war itself were not sacrilege and horror. 

But the German leaders were lacking in a 
certain delicacy of feeling, a certain finesse, 
which is not unconnected with sympathetic 
understanding of others nor yet unconnect- 
ed with a prudent self-regard. If they had 
possessed that quality, which they might 
indeed have acquired after living so long in 
the neighborhood of France, they would 
not have tried to carry the logic of war to 
such an extreme. It was a blunder to sink 
the Lusitania — a blunder not difficult per- 
haps to justify in a purely rational manner. 
War being essentially a competition in mur- 
der, having certain traditional rules that are 
supposed to regulate the competition, and 
these rules having been broken by England's 



THE ANTI-GERMAN HATE 28 

starvation policy, Germany announces that 
in a certain zone they are suspended, and 
the murder of British people will be more 
general. She expects us, since we have al- 
lowed England to break those rules at our 
expense, to allow her a like privilege. She 
expects us to stay on our own boats, so 
that she can fight England to the limit with 
her only free weapon on the sea. We re- 
main incredulous, and on the whole indif- 
ferent, until she carries her resolution to the 
extreme; the inconceivable happens; our 
most eminent and respectable citizens get 
blown up and sunk for their disregard of 
Germany's warning. Then we become in- 
tolerant, horrified, righteously indignant, 
ready to go to war, if reparation and apol- 
ogy are not forthcoming. A perfectly nat- 
ural and human and altogether inevitable 
reaction on our part, which the German 
leaders would have known enough to ex- 
pect, if they had had that habit of enter- 
ing into the minds of others, which makes 
the Southern peoples so much more adroit. 



24 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

The sinking of the Lusitania was "rea- 
sonable" enough, and it was not more in- 
human than many outrages in the history of 
other wars. England has committed Lusi- 
tania-sized atrocities. England's forcing a 
drug habit upon the Chinese nation at the 
point of the bayonet is one of the blackest 
atrocities of modern times. But England 
commits these brutalities for the most part 
in remote places, or upon socially negligible 
classes of people. We can not escape the 
opinion that a certain savoir faire would 
stay the hand of a British commander from 
sinking our American aristocrats on the At- 
lantic. Or if it would not stay his hand, at 
least there would be some Cabinet official 
or some influential private person provi- 
dentially on hand, to prevent his doing it. 

We may be wrong, but we have a feel- 
ing that anything so gauche and uncompre- 
hending as the sinking of the Lusitania, and 
the notes that followed it, however logical, 
would simply be "not done" by the ruling 



THE ANTI-GERMAN HATE 25 

classes of England. They are not more hu- 
mane; they merely know better. 

Here, then, is a difference between "Ger- 
many" and "England" which, if properly 
defined, may actually be found to exist. It 
does not attribute an imaginary heredity to 
an imaginary "race" of Teutons; it merely 
asserts a cultural characteristic which the 
German classes seem to have developed, and 
which in certain carefully chosen terms they 
are willing to admit they have developed. 
They call it being "absorbed with the es- 
sence of things to the detriment of form." * 
Suppose we permit ourselves to call it tran- 
scendental sophomoric egotism and contrast 
it with the egotism of England's classes, 
which is more matter-of-fact and more ma- 
ture. We shall see, I think, that even the 
sinking of the Lusitania is not a reasonable 
occasion for directing our single hatred 
against Germany. We might be aroused to 
that degree against a peculiar barbarism in 
any nation, but against a peculiarly tactless 

* Professor Otto Hintze, of the University of Berlin, in "Modern 
Germany in Relation to the Great War." 



26 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

blunder in the general business of barbarism 
we can hardly maintain a permanent na- 
tional hatred. 



NATIONALISTIC BIGOTRY 

IT may appear superfluous to explain all 
these points about Germany, the expla- 
nation being only a detailed statement of 
what we all knew before the war, that Ger- 
many is a nation of people like ourselves. 
They have the same racial development, and 
are composed of much the same races as 
we, and any average differences they reveal 
must necessarily be superficial and a result 
of their circumstances. That is all that 
needed to be said. However, a little ex- 
ercise in seeing those incidents as the Ger- 
mans see them will do no harm to our own 
egotism. It may prepare us to acknowl- 
edge just what it is in this business against 
which we ought to direct our hatred. 

It is not Germany that initiates war, that 



THE ANTI-GERMAN HATE 27 

violates neutrality, that commits atrocities, 
and murders our hopes for the world. Ger- 
many has merely done these things with 
exceptional skill and concentration. What 
has enabled her to do them, and what has 
enabled the other nations to emulate her, is 
the militant nationalism of the people. The 
causes of war are innumerable, but the un- 
derlying condition without which, no mat- 
ter what causes arose, wars could neither be- 
gin nor continue, is that egregious fighting 
identification of self with a nation, which 
is neither German nor English (nor even 
Irish) but a general human attribute. This 
is the thing that we ought to be hating; in- 
stead we are cultivating it in ourselves by 
hating another nation. 

It might be maintained, indeed, that Ger- 
many is the most afflicted with nationalism 
of all the countries, and that we ought for 
that very reason — even from the standpoint 
of internationalism — to range ourselves 
against her and wish for her defeat. Much 
that is said by the Germans in praise of 



28 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

themseves makes us feel that we ought. 
They not only praise their nation in a ful- 
some fashion, which provokes the disgust we 
feel toward an individual prig, but they 
praise it for exactly that quality, devoted 
admiration of itself, which is the essence of 
priggishness. 

A book about Germany which I have been 
reading lately was written jointly by a 
large number of her distinguished public 
men and scholars. It is a book of self-de- 
fense and appreciation in the face of ca- 
lumny.* It has been translated and pub- 
lished under the title, "Modern Germany in 
Relation to the Great War," and I wish 
every one in America might read it. It gives 
very strong support to the opinion that Ger- 
man people are human beings, just as they 
used to be ; but it also reveals, in many chap- 
ters, that assertive national egotism which 
is characteristic of the adolescence of this 
new empire. 

* "Modern Germany in Relation to the Great War," by various 
German writers. Translated by William Wallace Whitelock, Ph.D. 
624 pages. Mitchell Kennerley. 



THE ANTI-GERMAN HATE 29 

Germany's nationalism is more blatant 
than that of France or England, and the 
casuistries into which these serious profes- 
sors are led by their determination to at- 
tribute all virtues to the fatherland — even 
virtues that are exactly opposite, such as 
youthfulness and venerable age — are more 
obvious. They are more ludicrous than the 
casuistries of England's nationalistic books. 
Some of these writers seem to be unable even 
to mention an abstract virtue without pre- 
fixing the word "German" to it. "German 
strength," "German thoroughness," "Ger- 
man honesty" — would not any grown-up 
person have more tact than to fill with such 
expressions an article which he was address- 
ing to people of other nationalities? This 
fatuous self-adoration is too raw to exaspe- 
rate — one simply lumps it as an ailment 
which he must ignore if he is to enter into 
the truth of the book. 

Here, for instance, is Professor Ernst 
Troeltsch, of the University of Berlin, 



30 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

speaking of music as exemplifying the spirit 
of German culture: 

"In it is voiced, in a manner most appeal- 
ing to us, all that is unutterable and in- 
expressible in the German character, sim- 
plicity and heroism, mirth and melancholy, 
faith and doubt, empirical knowledge and 
intuition." 

We are embarrassed by so ingenuous a 
display of sentimental egotism. We are 
embarrassed and yet we have to laugh. We 
expect an article by the Professor of physi- 
ology celebrating joints and tendons, muscle 
and grey matter, liver and lights, as the pe- 
culiar wonders of the German anatomy. 

However, this is but an extreme manifes- 
tation of a universal human weakness. Self- 
love flourishes at the core of human nature, 
and our gracious culture continually re- 
presses it. Patriotism lets it gush out in a 
disguised form. Patriotism shows us how 
to identify ourselves with a nation, and then 
adore ourselves under the plausible guise 
of an altruistic passion. That is the ex- 



THE ANTI-GERMAN HATE 31 

planation of these fatuous casuistries, and of 
the peculiar disgust they evoke in one who 
identifies himself with a different nation, or 
with none. They are not peculiar to Ger- 
many; the peculiar thing is the crude and 
arrant manner of their Germanic expres- 
sion. 

In England their expression is usually, 
though not always, a little more subtle. In 
Professor Cramb's description of the spirit 
of English imperialism in the nineteenth 
century we find exactly the same mode of 
speech, and but for the fact that praise of 
England is nearer to praise of ourselves, we 
should have the same disgust for it. 

"To give all men within its bounds an 
English mind; to give all who come within 
its sway the power to look at the things of 
man's life, at the past, at the future, from 
the standpoint of an Englishman ; to diffuse 
within its bounds that high tolerance in re- 
ligion which has marked this empire from 
its foundation; that reverence yet boldness 
before the mysteriousness of life and death 



32 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

characteristic of our great poets and our 
great thinkers ; that love of free institutions, 
that pursuit of an ever-higher justice and 
a larger freedom which, rightly or wrongly, 
we associate with the temper and character 
of our race wherever it is dominant and se- 
cure." 

Nothing could be more disgusting in an 
individual than for him to lift up his voice 
in the public square and announce that he 
has the de luxe temper of mind, and is about 
to proceed to impose it upon the whole town ; 
nothing is more disgusting in a nation, to 
him who can rightly estimate the motives of 
nationalism. 

Mr. F. S. Oliver speaks of "the British 
Race" with a reverence one gives only to 
God and oneself.* And his description of 
England's imperialism, in a different way, 
is even more repellent than Professor 
Cramb's. 

"Britain," he says, "like Rome before her, 

* "The British Race," like the "German Race," is a phantasy of 
the brains of those whose egotism will not let them acknowledge 
that they simply belong to a group of people whose composition 
was determined by the accidents of history. See note, page 45. 



THE ANTI-GERMAN HATE 33 

built up her empire piecemeal ; for the most 
part reluctantly; always reckoning up the 
cost, labor, and burden of it; hating the re- 
sponsibility of expansion, and shouldering 
it only when there seemed to be no other 
course open to her in honor and safety." 

That passes anything that can be called 
by so tolerant a name as casuistry. It is one 
of those bland, unconscious hypocrisies by 
which the English government has always 
made England's gains appear generous, her 
murders dutiful, her tyrannies just. And 
the emotional force of it is self-love — just 
as quivering a sentimentality when once 
stripped of its perfect assurance as that of 
the German nationalist. 

"If I should die," said Rupert Brooke on 
his way to the Dardanelles, 

"Think only this of me, 
That there's some corner of a foreign field 
That is forever England. There shall be 
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed." 

For which egregious sentiment he will be 



34 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

honored in England long after the rest of 
his poetry is forgotten. 

It might be hoped that in America, where 
so many old-world nationalisms have been 
imported, and observed to evaporate into the 
nothing that they are, we should have ar- 
rived at a more cultivated knowledge of our- 
selves. And if there is, indeed, any special 
praise due to America among the nations, 
it will lie in that. Her hyphenated citizens 
are the best thing she has; for they have 
been given a celebrated opportunity to be- 
come men instead of Americans, intelligent 
instead of patriotic. Perhaps a few of them 
have ; but the signs are wanting in this coun- 
try of any general transcending of the big- 
otry of nations. 

The truth is that the roots of this dispo- 
sition lie deeper than anything we learn, and 
the most we can hope from the teaching of 
a new environment is that it may allow this 
inevitable weakness to remain unexag- 
gerated. It may be that fewer of our citi- 
zens are arrant nationalists than of Eng- 



THE ANTI-GERMAN HATE 35 

land's citizens. It may be that fewer of 
England's than of Germany's are so. The 
history of these countries leads us to expect 
it. But these differences, if they exist, are 
all too faint and superficial to be made a 
ground for wishing the downfall or defeat 
of any country. 

In fact, either a victory or a defeat is the 
thing that will inflame the patriotic bigotry 
of whatever country suffers it. We need not 
say which of these two is the greater mis_- 
fortune. So far as concerns the hope of 
reducing nationalism, and bringing for- 
ward the day of European union, we can 
wish for nothing better than a sombre dis- 
illusionment of all the belligerent nations. 
We can wish that no gains be recorded and 
no indemnities imposed, that these nations 
shall have to drag their way back to health 
and reason, each with no consolation, no 
glory, and no prize. Let them be defeated 
by war, and let them fear the victor. 



36 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 
VI 

THE MENACE OF DESPOTISM 

TO those who love liberty and individual 
life, there is a count against Germany 
in her political institutions which can not 
be argued away. Even the potent fumes of 
German metaphysics can not put us asleep 
to the fact that the German state is a mon- 
ster. It is a union of the absolute autoc- 
racy of a feudal caste with that high in- 
dustrial and technical and social-reform de- 
velopment which belongs to the modern 
world. Such a monster is far more horrible 
to contemplate, and far more sombre to the 
hope of universal liberty, than is the natural 
autocracy of a generally undeveloped coun- 
try like Russia. The revolutionary move- 
ment in Russia gives promise that before she 
reaches the stage of industrial efficiency 
which Germany has reached, her political in- 
stitutions will be so altered that she can not 
obstruct the progress of liberty with the full 



THE ANTI-GERMAN HATE 37 

power of science. At least she is not doing 
that now, and Germany remains for that 
reason eminent among ail nations as the bul- 
wark of monarchism. 

Her professors will patiently explain to 
us that we are mistaken in this matter. We 
do not quite understand "transcendental 
government"! Our failure of understand- 
ing seems to result, says Dr. Hans Luther, 
City Councillor of Berlin,* "from the con- 
viction that the democratic form of govern- 
ment is the only one that gives citizens the 
proper influence on the destinies of the state. 
This is a confusion between form and sub- 
stance. The important question is the real- 
ization of the state as a corporate entity in 
which the individual lives in freedom and 
can assert himself. By what means this goal 
is to be reached is a question of form. ..." 

Dr. Hans Luther will have to forgive us, 
then, if quite apart from any feeling of na- 
tionalism or military hostility whatever, we 
declare that this particular question of form 

* In "Modern Germany in Relation to the Great War," p. 218. 



88 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

is to us the paramount question. And the 
more the German professors are willing to 
rationalize autocracy into a metaphysical 
kind of liberty, and the more the German 
patriots are willing to explain that the Ger- 
man simply happens to like order and duty 
and discipline, as we like liberty and respon- 
sibility and individual assertion, the more 
determined is our conviction that the back- 
wardness of Germany's political evolution 
is the tragedy of Europe. 

For the tendency to make a virtue of ne- 
cessity is universal, and we are certain that 
the professors and their pupils of Germany 
do not "like" feudal government any more 
than the professors and their pupils of Eng- 
land and France "liked" it, when they had 
it. We understand their liking it perfectly 
well; we understand their calling it "tran- 
scendental government." It is in fact their 
liking it and calling it pet names, rather 
than the mere existence of it, which makes 
it so dangerous a menace to our hopes. That 
this monarchic military state, and all the 



THE ANTI-GERMAN HATE 39 

emotions and ideologies of the heart and 
mind which inevitably attach to it, should 
be rooted up and overthrown in Germany, 
is the dear wish of every internationalist who 
loves liberty. 

Upon this wish alone a great many of 
us, who have no nationalism, based our 
prayer, at the outbreak of the war, that Ger- 
many might be signally defeated. "The 
German people," we said, "are now held fast 
under the heel of militarism — more solidly 
and consentingly held there than any other 
people of Europe. That feudal and abso- 
lute military oppression, linked fast with 
cultural and scientific and social reform 
progress of the highest type, is the most 
abominable monster in Europe. And it is 
the only monster that will surely be slain 
by a victory of its enemies. That is why 
we advocate the arms of the Allies, though 
we have no patriotism but our love of lib- 
erty, and no faith that Russia is righting in 
the battle of democracy, and no delusion 



40 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

that England and France are the sole re- 
positories of culture and altruism."* 

But the war has taught us some things. 
It has taught us that national patriotism 
is a stronger force than we had ever 
dreamed. We learned, when our socialist 
reporters went to Germany, that only four 
or five hundred thousand of the German So- 
cialists were against the Kaiser's war when 
it began; that between instinctive patriot- 
ism and compulsory enlistment the revolu- 
tionary group was utterly broken; that 
Karl Liebknecht, their leader and hero, al- 
though a member of the Reichstag, had been 
compelled to don a uniform and go to the 
front to perform menial services for officers 
of the army. We learned what terrible 
power a crisis of nationalism gives into the 
hands of government. And so we have been 
brought, some of us, to believe that the 
crushing of Germany, as well as a German 
victory, would oppose an obstacle to the 
progress of her revolution. 

* Editorial in The Masses, October, 19 14, 



THE ANTI-GERMAN HATE 41 

For German defeat would mean another 
crisis of nationalism. Injured self-esteem 
is as absorbing to the heart as exultant van- 
ity. Every German would be a patriot if 
Germany were invaded ; Liebknecht himself 
would be fighting — or unheard of. The best 
blessing we can invoke upon him now is that 
too many of the youth who will follow his 
leadership may not be slain, and that he may 
have at the war's end a nation filled with a 
sense of failure to achieve, but not inflamed 
with the mortification of defeat. 

It is no more certain that Germany owes 
her political forms (and the minds of her 
professors who defend them ) to historic cir- 
cumstance, than it is certain that the new 
circumstances — her commercial and 'indus- 
trial development of forty years — will give 
her new political forms. It has been a sur- 
prise to see how many Socialists, trained in 
the economic interpretation of political 
things, have fallen into the ignorant epi- 
demic of fear lest Germany should impose 
"autocracy" on all the democratic countries. 



42 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

They seem to have forgotten all about the 
forces that gave us democracy, and guaran- 
tee it to us, and will give Germany democ- 
racy as surely as they gave it to us. I have 
heard a Socialist candidate for high office 
seriously discuss the possibility of a German 
sentry standing guard at the doors of our 
houses for the rest of our lives. It seems to 
me there are times when those impersonal 
doctrines of historic evolution which Marx 
bequeathed to the revolutionary movement, 
are too frigid to be used. But in a time of 
patriotic wars, when every mind is besieged 
by some mania parading as an idealism, a 
breath of their cool atmosphere ought to be 
kept blowing all the time. 

The forces that bring liberty are at work 
in Germany as elsewhere in the world, and 
her imperial despotism will rot within its 
own heart and fall. We can only lend our 
aid to those slow forces. And the best aid 
we can lend is to take out of their way this 
obstacle, whose power is new to our knowl- 
edge — exalted nationalism. If any side 



THE ANTI-GERMAN HATE 43 

must conquer, perhaps we are warranted in 
hoping as democrats that it may be the Al- 
lies. But our greater hope should be that 
a vast pall of equable failure — the disil- 
lusionment of patriotism — may descend all 
over Europe at the war's end. For in that 
shadow revolutionary things may be accom- 
plished. 



UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

PERHAPS the most important thing we 
can do in America at this moment is 
to understand Germany. Most Americans, 
who are not of German birth, desire the de- 
feat of the Kaiser's arms. And they desire 
this because they love liberty, and the major- 
ity of the German people do not seem to love 
it. They submit themselves devotedly to an 
imperial master, and they live in an atmos- 
phere of negative commandments under the 
rule of a feudal caste. We dread lest their 
victory should mean the spreading of that 
atmosphere and that way of living over the 
world. 

It is not to be doubted, however, that the 
babies of Germany are born with as strong 
a love of liberty as the babies of Anglo- 
Saxondom. They are not of a different 

44 



UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 45 

race.* What we call races, in our loose con- 
versation and journalism, are not races at 
all, but merely groups of people who live 
under certain traditional ideas. And the 
people who live under German ideas have 
the same native desire to feel free that we 
have. 

Luther is worshipped in Germany as the 



* This fact is a commonplace of anthropology. Mr. W. Z. Ripley, 
of Harvard, in "The Races of Europe," speaks the authoritative 
word of science on this subject. And his important book is recom- 
mended to the reader. 

Based upon Ripley's work, the first note in the appendix of 
Thorstein Veblen's "Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revo- 
lution," demolishes utterly the claim of either Germany or Eng- 
land to a single or unique race. It is the profoundest brief treatise 
upon race in relation to the war. I quote his conclusion: 

"Whether the matter is taken from the side of current everyday 
observation or from that of European race-history, the outcome 
appears to be the same: there is no hereditary difference between, 
e. g., the British, the German and the Slavic population — say of 
Great Russia — when these are considered as aggregates. Each 
varies by wider differences within itself than the average differ- 
ence between one and another." 

It is one of our most serious popular errors to confuse the 
boundaries of a racial heredity with the boundaries of a nation or 
a spoken language. And for a further authority against it, I quote 
these paragraphs from Franz Boas, Professor of Anthropology at 
Columbia University: 

"In our imagination the local racial types of Europe have been 
identified with the modern nations, and thus the supposed heredi- 
tary characteristics of the races have been confused with na- 
tional characteristics. In vain, sober scientific thought has re- 
monstrated against this identification. 

"In western Europe types are distributed in strata that fol- 
low one another from north to south — in the north the blond, 
in the center a dark, short-headed type, in the south the slightly 
built Mediterranean type. 

"National boundaries in central Europe, on the other hand, run 
north and south, and so we find the northern French, Belgian, 
Hollander, German, and Russian to be about the same in type and 
descent; the central French, south German, Szviss, north Italian, 
Austrian, Servian, and central Russian to be all the same variety 
of man, and the southern French to be closely related to the types 
»f the eastern and western Mediterranean area. 



46 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

champion of liberty for the individual con- 
science against the dictates of the Roman 
Church. Goethe's Faust is the classic of 
the mind's liberation from dogmatic schol- 
arship. Kant's philosophy is a monumen- 
tal apparatus for establishing "God, free- 
dom and immortality" in the face of mathe- 
matical law and the causal determinism of 
modern science. Schiller's "Hymn to Lib- 
erty" is almost a domestic song. Heine 
cast loose from every bond that he could 
think of in his day. And Nietzsche thought 
of more. He cast loose from the bond of 
Christian ethics. There is no fuller rec- 
ord of the ideal love of liberty than is fur- 
nished by these heroes of Germany's cul- 
ture. And until we feel ourselves kindred 
to the Germans in this deep impulse, we 
shall not understand them. 

When a man loves a woman, and he can 
not have her in the fashion of the flesh, he 
becomes so much the more enamored of her 
spirit, and builds up a little universe of 
ideal and emotional experience in which she 



UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 47 

is the queen. It was so that Dante loved 
Beatrice. It was so that the medieval saints 
loved the Mother of God. It is so that the 
Germans love liberty. 

Through accident or the caprice of his- 
tory, and not through any quality of their 
nature, the German people have issued into 
the new age, with the bonds of feudalism 
still on them. Because the King of Prus- 
sia had a domain of his own, and did not 
depend upon them for money support, his 
barons never united in handing him a 
Magna Charta.* Because commerce and the 
industrial arts were so late to flourish there, 
the bourgeois wealth of Prussia never yet 
marshalled the common people in one of 
those democratic revolutions that altered the 
face of politics in England and France. . 
In order to survive the European wars of 
conquest, it became imperative for the 
freer states, and the republican cities, with- 

* Dr. Ernst Flagg Henderson, author of "A Short History of 
Germany," criticizing Frederic Howe, who was my authority for 
this statement, declares that "the crown lands were taken over 
by the Prussian state, although a part of the revenues from them 
goes to pay the King's civil list." I mention this correction for 
the sake of accuracy, though it does not affect my argument. 



48 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

in German territory to unite under Prussia 
as under an imperial power. For such rea- 
sons as these it happened that all those north 
European kindred of ours, with their emo- 
tional love of liberty, became patriotic mem- 
bers of an empire which subjects them to 
its own ends, the ends of a feudal nobility 
in Prussia. 

Is it not natural that a people who love 
liberty as we do, and yet are induced by 
the accidents of their evolution to pay honor 
of devotion to such a government, should 
manufacture their liberty in an ideal world 
of the spirit? And having manufactured, 
must they not inevitably overassert its 
glories? It seems to me quaintly charac- 
teristic of all human nature that these peo- 
ple, dwelling beside us under a feudal au- 
thority, should suggest to themselves that 
the intense spirituality of their freedom is 
the mark of a superior race. There was 
never a disappointed lover who did not 
congratulate his soul upon its soulful- 
ness. There was never a consecrated saint 



UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 49 

who escaped entirely the mood of self- 
righteousness. It is by such analogies 
that we in America can understand 
the zeal with which patriotic subjects of 
an emperor march out to death believing 
that they defend a freedom of the soul of 
man which is the unique heritage of their 
"race." 

The master expression of the German at- 
titude to life is the philosophy of Emanuel 
Kant, expounded in two books, the detailed 
understanding of which is in itself a liberal 
profession. John Dewey, in his "German 
Philosophy and Politics," says : "It is a pre- 
carious undertaking to single out some one 
thing in German philosophy as of typical 
importance in understanding German na- 
tional life. Yet I am committed to the ven- 
ture. My conviction is that we have its 
root idea in the doctrine of Kant concern- 
ing the two realms, one outer, physical and 
necessary, the other inner, ideal and free.* 

* John Dewey's assertion is supported by a recent statement of 
Dr. Ernst Troetsch of the University of Berlin. In "Modern Ger- 
many in Relation to the Great War," he says: "German philosophy 
was created by Leibniz and Kant. . . . Their spirit has acted on clas- 



50 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

To this we must add that, in spite of their 
separateness and independence, the primacy 
always lies with the inner. As compared 
with this, the philosophy of a Nietzsche, to 
which so many resort at the present time 
for explanation of what seems to them other- 
wise inexplicable, is but a superficial and 
transitory wave of opinion. Surely the 
chief mark of distinctively German civili- 
zation is its combination of self-conscious 
idealism with unsurpassed technical effi- 
ciency and organization in the varied fields 
of action." 

This statement of the heart of German 



sical German literature and poetry, and in conjunction with these 
it laid the foundation of German idealism, which once more to-day 
after many fluctuations dominates German philosophy and has 
done more inwardly to form and strengthen German youth than 
anything else within the last twenty years. . . German idealism up 
to the present may be said to have set itself the task of combining 
with the mechanical concept of nature the full appreciation of 
the moral, religious and artistic spirit, and the assertion of freedom." 

More specifically he declares that "German freedom came into 
being according to Kant's conception of it, as the freedom of 
spontaneous recognition of duty and right." 

To be free, in short, is to be so accommodating as to desire to do 
what you have to do. This elaborate sentimental sophism of Kant's 
was indeed born in Germany, but it has been imported and found 
useful as a political soporific in every corner of the globe. You will 
see it in bold marble letters over the courthouse as your train 
passes through Cleveland, Ohio— 

"obedience to law is liberty" 

Pitiful attempt of the weakness of man to get happiness out of 
a hard world by juggling nouns in his brain. 



UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 51 

philosophy, with the rest that is to be found 
in John Dewey's little book, greatly extends 
our understanding of Germany. It en- 
ables us clearly to recognize that Ger- 
man people have the same instinctive na- 
ture that we have. It tells us by what 
mighty edifices of intellectuality and art 
they have sought to satisfy that nature. 
And if we enter these structures with sym- 
pathy, we can see how easily we too should 
have become laboriously soulful in our at- 
tainment of the feeling of freedom, if we 
had not been blessed with that little modi- 
cum of "civil liberty" upon which we have 
so long exercised our love. For this subtle 
interior device by which the mind compen- 
sates with a theory when the body is dis- 
appointed of a fact, is not peculiar to any 
people. It is a universal trick of man's na- 
ture. It is the key to most systems of phi- 
losophy. 

There is another theory, too, and another 
fact which helps the people of Germany to 
enjoy their kind of freedom. The theory is 



52 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

that the state is a good in itself, more im- 
portant than the destiny of any number of 
individuals. The state is created by the 
individuals using themselves as material, and 
the very best thing that can befall an indi- 
vidual is to become the material of a noble 
and harmonious state. And this theory has 
been so well employed by the ruling classes 
in Prussia, that almost any German who 
is not a revolutionist will tell you, as Pro- 
fessor Miinsterberg does, that he is abso- 
lutely and really free, but he chooses in his 
freedom to make the aims of the state para- 
mount to his own. 

A professor in a German university, who 
is very fond of ultra-modern music, re- 
frained from attending a celebrated opera 
because his emperor (emperor of his uni- 
versity) had withheld approval from it. He 
attended the opera in Paris. But he was 
eager to explain to the Parisians that in 
not attending in Berlin he was acting as a 
free agent who loved the ideal of an or- 
dered state. 



UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 53 

We need not imagine that this ideal would 
be so much loved in Germany, however, if 
the state were not exceedingly well ordered. 
And that is the material fact, which makes 
all these rather insubstantial ideals accept- 
able to so many. The ruling caste in Ger- 
many have known how not only to preach 
the theory of well-being in a disciplined 
state — every ruling caste has done that — 
but they have been wise enough actually 
to produce a little of the well-being. And 
that is the triumph they are celebrating now. 
The masses of the people are better off in 
Germany than they are anywhere else. The 
government is authoritative, but also it is 
social. As Frederic C. Howe says of the 
worker : 

"His education, his health, and his work- 
ing efficiency are matters of constant con- 
cern. He is carefully protected from ac- 
cident by laws and regulations governing 
factories. He is trained in his hand and in 
his brain to be a good workman and is in- 
sured against accident, sickness, and old age. 



54 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

When idle through no fault of his own, work 
is frequently found for him. When home- 
less, a lodging is offered so that he will not 
easily pass to the vagrant class. When sick, 
he is cared for in wonderful convalescent 
homes, tuberculosis hospitals, and farm col- 
onies. When old age removes him from the 
mill or the factory, a pension awaits him." 

And this policy of the German state has 
been knowingly adopted by its rulers, in or- 
der to deaden the demand of hundreds of 
thousands of their people for a more re- 
alistic liberty. This quotation of a speech 
from the throne is significant. 

"His Majesty hopes that the measure 
[accident insurance] will in principle re- 
ceive the assent of the federal governments, 
and that it will be welcomed by the Reichs- 
tag as a complement of the legislation af- 
fording protection against Social -Demo- 
cratic movements." 

Whether this people continue to conquer 
or come finally to the end of their power, 
they have already demonstrated their su- 



UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 55 

perioi energy* and capability in united ac- 
tion. They have taught the value of popu- 
lar welfare insured by a centralized gov- 
ernment to those" who wish to rule in any 
country. Care for your people if you want 
them to fight. Care for them if you want 
them to work. It pays. That is a policy 
of German culture that will become the com- 
mon heritage of the world, whatever way 
the war goes. That policy not only the So- 
cial-Democrats in Germany, but the lovers 
of real liberty in all countries, will have to 
meet and understand. They will have to 
find a way to transcend that. 

It is not beyond possibility that, with a 
sufficient advance in material welfare, the 
masses of the people in our own country 
might be led to accept a liberty that was 
merely political form and historic emotion. 
There are signs that this may be the fate of 
our boasted freedom of man, that it may be- 
come as insubstantial in its way as that 
"spiritual" freedom which Kant taught the 
Germans how to believe in. We have to re- 



56 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

member that the true freedom, and the true 
independence, is economic; and such inde- 
pendence for the masses is not yet estab- 
lished in any country. It is our task for the 
future. We have to construct a genuinely 
free society out of the confluence of that 
state-socialism attended by paternal disci- 
pline, which is the political contribution of 
Germany to the world, and that individual- 
istic capitalism attended by want and misery, 
which is the contribution of England. For 
this reason it behooves us to understand Ger- 
many. 



ON CHARACTERIZING 
NATIONS 

IN conversation and newspaper philosophy 
we speak of nations as though they were 
individual people. 

"The English are hypocritical," we say. 

"The Germans are brutal." 

"England is self-righteous." 

"Germany is sentimental." 

We seriously argue such propositions ; and 
we attach to the collective name of millions 
of individuals, having every kind and de- 
gree of human character among them, emo- 
tions which properly pertain to a particu- 
lar individual of a particular character. The 
result of this is that our newspapers and 
our conversation contain almost no cogent 
reasoning or valid feeling on the subject of 
nationality. 

When I say that "England is self-right- 
eous," three genuine meanings are possible. 

57 



58 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

I may mean to characterize the public policy 
and utterances of the present British gov- 
ernment. That is a definite and somewhat 
solidary group, which at least acts as an 
individual, and can be so characterized. But 
the inferences that can be drawn from such 
a characterization are quite limited. 

Or I may mean that a greater number 
of people in England are self-righteous than 
in other countries. In that case I ought to 
spend my thoughts deciding how many and 
what particular classes of people ; and in this 
process I should find that much of the glib- 
ness, if not all of the certainty, had evapo- 
rated out of my remark. I should no longer 
have any fun making it!/ 

Or finally I might mean that the people 
in England who are self-righteous, are more 
self-righteous than the people who are 
self-righteous in other countries. And that 
is so complicated and difficult a quantita- 
tive proposition to handle that I should prob- 
ably give up the attempt before I had drawn 
any very passionate conclusions. 



CHARACTERIZING NATIONS 59 

No more quieting counsel can be given 
the excited nationalist of any country, than 
to ask him to be very sure that everything 
he says means something. 



A NOTE ON NIETZSCHE 

NO person is to blame for the fighting 
character of our civilization, or for 
this war which is its natural child. But 
few people have enough fortitude to face 
a disaster without the solace of cursing 
somebody, and in the present disaster 
Friedrich Nietzsche has been chosen by a 
good many as an appropriate person to 
curse. 

Nietzsche's writings supplied a motto to 
the title-page of a militarist book by the 
German general Bernhardi, and the motto 
is this: "War and courage have done more 
great things than the love to the neighbor." 

But Nietzsche was also a great hater of 
nationalism, a prophet of the "Unity of Eu- 
rope," and he expressed with zeal and fervor 
exactly the attitude that would make this 

war impossible. He said : 

60 



A NOTE ON NIETZSCHE 61 

"A little more fresh air, for Heaven's 
sake! This ridiculous condition of Europe 
must not last any longer. Is there a single 
idea behind this bovine nationalism? What 
positive value can there be in encouraging 
this arrogant self-conceit when everything 
to-day points to greater and more common 
interests? The economic unity of Europe 
must come." 

It is foolish, after four or five thousand 
years' history of continual bloodshed, to 
blame this particular war upon a relatively 
unknown German thinker who happened to 
live in the generation before it. But at 
least it serves to bring that thinker to the 
popular attention, and Nietzsche said some 
things that everybody ought to hear. 

Nietzsche was born in Germany in 1844, 
and he was born with an intense and glo- 
rious personal ambition. I think he secret- 
ly longed to be a hero. And when he dis- 
covered that he was only going to be a col- 
lege professor, that unsatisfied ambition of 
his found vent in a mighty vein of hero-wor- 



62 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

ship, and the poetic celebration of strong 
men, and the invention and worship of the 
ideal of the "Superman." To him the Su- 
perman was more than an ideal: it was a 
type which we could produce upon earth by 
cultivating the pagan and heroic virtues, by 
crushing the weak and the unfit, and by 
adopting those methods of procedure which 
are now known as the science of Eugenics. 
This was the tonic moral and poetic vision 
which Nietzsche's own repressed ambition 
gave to the world. But in middle life that 
repressed ambition broke loose from its fet- 
ters, and began to realize itself in delusions 
of grandeur, and Nietzsche came at last to 
the mad-house imagining that he was a fa- 
mous murderer, he was the King of Italy, 
he was God. 

All sincere moral ideals, even the most 
contradictory, are useful to some people at 
some times. And Nietzsche's ideal of the 
fighting superman is especially useful to 
the "spiritual" people of our time, because 
they have been a little overfed with its op- 



A NOTE ON NIETZSCHE 63 

posite, the ideal of humility and submis- 
sion and long-suffering love. Theirs is a 
"slave-morality," according to Nietzsche, 
and it is the "master-morality" whose praise 
he sings so ruthlessly in their ears. 

He attacks with stings of laughter and 
bitterness the whole submissive teaching of 
the Christian Church, which he attributes 
not to Jesus but to St. Paul, saying that 
' 'the gospel' died on the cross." And al- 
though he always speaks in a gentler tone 
of Jesus, the "founder of a little Jewish 
sect," His ethics too he condemns as arrantly 
as he condemns the church. As Tolstoy was 
a fanatical upholder of the last letter of the 
gospel, Nietzsche was a fanatical denouncer 
of it. He hated such things as the Beati- 
tudes, because they seemed to him to exalt 
what is base and weak and ignoble — Blessed 
are the meek, Blessed are the poor in spirit, 
Blessed are they that mourn. We can only 
say that such expressions "got on the 
nerves" of Nietzsche, as they must have got 
on the nerves of many other high-spirited 



64 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

people who were not honest enough to say 
so. 

"If the degenerate and sick man ('the 
Christian') is to be of the same value as 
the healthy man ('the pagan'), the natural 
course of evolution is thwarted and the un- 
natural becomes law. What the species re- 
quires is the suppression of the physiologi- 
cally botched, the weak, and the degenerate ; 
but it was precisely to these people that 
Christianity appealed as a preservative 
force. He who does not consider this atti- 
tude of mind as immoral, as a crime against 
life, belongs himself to the sickly crowd, 
and also shares their instincts. Genuine 
love of mankind exacts sacrifice for the good 
of the species; it is hard, full of self-con- 
trol, because it needs human sacrifice." 

Thus Nietzsche attacked the current 
morality of idealistic people. But it must 
not be thought that he put nothing in its 
place, or that he demanded nothing of his 
supermen but greedy indulgence of their 
personal desires. His supermen are not for 



A NOTE ON NIETZSCHE 65 

the indolent to emulate. They are heroes. 
Self-control, intellect, action, discipline, and 
eternal sacrifice for posterity, are their vir- 
tues. "By still greater ones than any of 
the saviors must ye be saved, my brethren, 
if ye would find the way to freedom!" "He 
who can not command himself, shall obey." 
According to Nietzsche, only through 
the enslavement of the many can the 
great development of the few be achieved. 
"A higher culture can only originate where 
there are two distinct castes of society, that 
of the working class, and that of the leisured 
class who are capable of true leisure; or, 
more strongly expressed, the caste of com- 
pulsory labor and the caste of free labor. 
Slavery is of the essence of Culture." 

This is true enough of the culture of to- 
day, as any one can see. But Nietzsche's 
mistake lay in assuming that this culture of 
to-day is a fit basis upon which to build 
the hope of supermen. Our aristocracy is 
not an aristocracy of strength or merit, 
physical or intellectual, but an aristocracy of 



66 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

wealth. You could match Nietzsche's own 
description of supermen more nearly in the 
ranks of the United Mine Workers of 
America than in the Union League Club. 
A glance at a few portraits — King George, 
and Czar Nicholas, and Vincent Astor — 
is enough to prove that there is nothing 
"super" about our nobility but their posses- 
sions. 

Nietzsche had no contact with the world 
of affairs, and for that reason he failed to 
see this. He failed to see how the prin- 
ciple of the survival of the strong,, upon 
which he rested his hope, has been destroyed 
in human society by the existence of hered- 
itary wealth and hereditary opportunity. 

Had Nietzsche been a little less of the 
hermit and a little less perhaps of the snob, 
he would have been wiser. He would have 
realized that the contest must be made 
equal and "free for all," if those truly "fit- 
test" are to survive. In short, he would 
have grasped a greater ideal — the ideal of a 
Super-Society, in which all men are free, 



A NOTE ON NIETZSCHE 67 

and those born with heroic and great gifts 
or characters must inevitably rise to emi- 
nence, through their sheer value to man- 
kind. 

Perceiving this, Nietzsche would have 
been one of the supreme moralists of his- 
tory. For he would have addressed these 
warlike bugle-calls to the whole world. And 
though many need to be reminded of humil- 
ity and meekness and love, fully as many 
need to be aroused. 

If your course of conduct is stunting and 
withering your power of life, it is bad and 
not good, no matter how patient, how long- 
suffering, how dutiful, how virtuous even, 
it may be! Strength and courage to com- 
mand and change your world, are what the 
voice of nature demands of you. 

This is the stern message that Nietzsche 
addressed to the soul of man, and it will 
never be forgotten. And if it led him, as 
he says, "occasionally to chant a pa?an of 
war," we may be sure it is not the kind of 
war, blind and fatal and undeliberate, which 



68 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

is now being waged by the nations of 
Europe. The war he chanted was a war in 
the interest of truth and ideas. 

"I greet all the signs indicating that a 
more manly and warlike age is commenc- 
ing, which will, above all, bring heroism 
again into honor. For it has to prepare 
the way for a yet higher age, and gather 
the force which the latter will one day re- 
quire — the age which will carry heroism into 
knowledge and wage war for the sake of 
ideas and their consequences." 



SOMETHING TO HATE 

THERE is no such thing as German 
militarism. The Germans are not a 
different kind of people from the English. 
They are the same kind of people placed 
in different circumstances. And because of 
those circumstances they have retained and 
developed a monarchic-military form of 
government. 

Chief among those circumstances is their 
geographic position — the fact that they are 
an inland nation wholly surrounded by po- 
tentially hostile neighbors. 

Chief among the reasons why England 
developed so early a parliamentary form of 
government, protected by an immense navy, 
is her geographic position — the fact that 
she is an island nation, and her freedom 
from invasion, combined with her commerce 
and manufacture, early gave to her com- 

69 



70 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

mons a greater wealth, and a greater power, 
than the landed aristocracy possessed. 

Chief among the reasons why we of the 
United States have neither a large army nor 
an immense navy, is our geographic posi- 
tion — the fact that no power adequate to 
invade and injure our territory is within 
striking distance. We retain, and we can 
develop still further if we keep our heads, 
the rudiments of democratic civilization. 

But we are not keeping our heads, when 
we denounce "German Militarism" in one 
breath, and advocate "Military Prepared- 
ness" in the other. These two things are 
one and the same. 

Militarism is not a trait of any race or 
nation. It is a certain way of spending 
human life and energy, and has the same 
characters wherever it appears. German 
militarism is simply highly expert, effective 
militarism in rather large quantities. Its 
characters are perhaps adequately described 
by Professor and Dr. Ernst Troeltsch, of 
Berlin, in these laudatory words : 



SOMETHING TO HATE 71 

"All the things of which I have spoken, 
monarchy, army, school, administration and 
economy, rest upon an extraordinary in- 
stinct for order, combined with stern disci- 
pline and an earnest sense of duty. . . . 

"Order and duty, solidarity and disci- 
pline are the watchwords of our officialdom, 
of associations and corporations, of large 
and small business concerns, of our labor 
unions, and of the great social insurance 
undertakings." 

The same truth is indicated with equal 
clarity for those who can see, by F. S. Oli- 
ver, the friend of Lord Roberts, and a great 
advocate of universal military service for 
England. 

"Army and Society in conscript coun- 
tries," he cries with envy, "are one and the 
same." And he does not imagine that an 
army, or an army-society, can be conducted 
on the principles of democratic liberty. He 
makes that clear in a good half of his cele- 
brated book, which is devoted to berating 
the manner in which English parliamentary 



72 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

leaders are forever wondering how much the 
people will stand. He does not want Eng- 
land to become a "democracy"; he wants her 
to remain only a "representative govern- 
ment," which he perceives to be a very dif- 
ferent thing. 

A more brutal statement of the nature of 
militarism, however, than either England 
or Germany has officially produced, will be 
found in these words of Major General 
John F. O'Ryan, commander of the New 
York State Militia (N. Y. Times, October 
21, 1915): 

"The war in Europe has demonstrated 
that the conduct of war requires absolute co- 
ordination, unity of purpose and absolute 
command. In this country we are very 
much better off for material things than we 
are for soldiers. The recruit does not know 
how to carry out orders. His mental state 
differs from that of the trained soldier, who 
obeys mechanically. We must get our men 
so that they are machines, and this can be 
done only by means of a process of training. 



SOMETHING TO HATE 73 

"When the feeling of fear — the natural 
instinct of self-preservation — comes over a 
man there must be something to hold him 
to his duty. We have to have our men 
trained so that the influence of fear is over- 
powered by the peril of an uncompromising 
military system, often backed up by a pis- 
tol in the hands of an officer. We must 
make the men unconsciously forget their 
fear. All these matters of standing at at- 
tention and 'Sir, I have the honor to report,' 
are valuable to put him through the bio- 
logical and social process by which he be- 
comes a soldier. 

"That is the reason why we cannot have 
any military force simply by having dinners 
and entertainments. The recruits have got 
to put their heads into the military noose. 
They have got to be 'jacked up' — they have 
got to be 'bawled out.' ... It must be 
a one-man power." 

That is what militarism and the military 
spirit is, the world over. If you love it, 
adopt it, although the geographic conditions 



74 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

which privileged your country to escape it 
continue exactly what they were before the 
war. Adopt it for its own sake. 

But if you hate it, do not delude your- 
self into imagining it is Germany that you 
hate. It is yourselves as you will become, 
if the dreams of your munition-makers and 
gold-braid patriots are realized. Your own 
militarists are trading upon your hatred 
of Germany in order to foist upon you, 
without the excuse that Germany has, the 
very thing which you hate in Germany, and 
which is hers through the unfortunate ac- 
cidents of history and geography. 

Do not let them make you hate Germany. 
Hate militarism. And hate it the most where 
you have the best chance to do something 
against it. Hate it here. 

America first! 



PART TWO 
THE ONLY WAY TO END WAR 



THE ONLY WAY TO END 
WAR 

NOTHING compels admiration and 
hope of man's nature more than to 
see him wage war. War has kindled the 
people of Europe to a sustained excess of 
energy and sacrifice. Each soldier, like a 
heated engine, functions better than his 
power. He inhabits a sturdier self. He 
performs, endures, faces what he had no 
blood to face. Of nine hundred and ninety- 
nine in every thousand of those marching 
boys, their neighbors would have to say, "I 
never thought he had it in him!" And these 
neighbors too, with quiet nerve, and uncom- 
plaining penury, and work, and sacrifice of 
sacred habits — though they stay at home, 
they share the elevation of all human power. 
For that is what an ideal common purpose, 
fitted to our native instincts and re-echoed 

through a social world, can do. It can drag 

77 



78 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

up out of our torpid abdomens a force we 
never dreamed of. It can stampede the 
energies of men, and hold them at a higher 
level over years. 

Some day this miracle will happen for a 
greater purpose than the mere defense of 
nationalities. Some day men will wage a 
more fruitful pursuit than war. That is the 
hope one brings home. And to that end we 
ought to plan, with science and with care, 
the steps that must be taken in America to 
make war itself unnatural. 

Peace advocates are of two kinds: those 
who seek to alter the external mechanisms 
through which war is engendered, and those 
who seek to alter the tendency of people to 
fight in loyalty to a nation. 

The Survey tabulated the proposals of the 
former under these heads: Concert of 
Powers, Reduction of Armaments, Inter- 
national Police, Territorial Changes, Demo- 
cratic Control of Foreign Policy, Guaran- 
tees of Democratic Government, Economic 
Changes, Abolition of Indemnities, An Im- 



THE WAY TO END WAR 79 

mediate Convention of Neutral Nations. 

The New Review, a journal of interna- 
tional Socialism, has emphasized the oppo- 
site kind of proposals, those which look to 
a change in the attitudes of people — Anti- 
nationalism, Revolution against War, 
against Militarism, International Solidarity 
of the Working Class, Anti-patriotism. It 
is indeed the orthodox view of Socialists that 
war will be ended only with a realization 
by the workers of all nations that they have 
no quarrel with each other, their quarrel 
is with their masters. Socialists do not seek 
to alter the underlying motives of people, 
but they seek to educate that self-interest 
which they assume to be the ruling motive. 

Norman Angell relies upon the same 
method — but he preaches his gospel rather 
to the business and leisure class. His dem- 
onstration of the commercial and cultural 
futility of conquest in modern war is the 
classic of our bourgeois peace movement. 
But his belief that by teaching the people 
this great fact he can ultimately dispose 



80 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

them to cease going to war and arming 
against threats of invasion, is not dissimilar 
to the faith of the Socialists. It looks to a 
change in people's attitudes. 

Arthur Bullard, writing in the Century 
Magazine for August, 1915, advocates even 
a more radical alteration of man. "One 
school of philosophy," he says, "has taught 
that the motor force of life was 'will to 
power,' and that war was a normal activity. 
If this is true, we must change our natures 
and develop a will to justice. There is no 
other foundation for peace." 

The churches, though they set us a weak 
example in the Lusitania crisis, stand upon 
the same extreme hope. They look for an 
era of peace and brotherhood through moral 
regeneration; a change in the impulses of 
men's hearts. 

And many of the workers in the Women's 
Peace Party think also that a reform of 
the popular attitude, especially the attitude 
of those who teach children, is the only be- 
ginning of the end of war. 



THE WAY TO END WAR 81 

To me all these attempts to remove from 
man's nature the bellicose-patriotic — 
whether by moral exhortation or by mental 
enlightenment — appear Utopian and a waste 
of strength. The hope of the Socialists and 
of Norman Angell seems as forlorn in 
its way, as the hope of the Church. Not 
by curing or educating out of us the war- 
like disposition, I believe, but by making cer- 
tain rather simple alterations in our external 
circumstances, we shall ultimately abolish 
war. 

It was the error of St. Paul to suppose 
that by "mortifying the flesh," which means 
suppressing the instincts in a spiritual exal- 
tation, one could permanently change the 
hereditary nature of man. I think the sub- 
sequent history of Christian civilization and 
its present culmination in Europe, are 
enough to prove the grossness of that error. 
But biological science holds it proven in a 
more definite way. The nature which a man 
or any animal inherits, according to that 
science, is transmitted to his offspring un- 



82 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

affected by his personal education, or by any 
qualities that he may acquire during his life. 
So that even when you have made an ex- 
pert saint of an individual, you will have 
to start the task all over again at the same 
point with his children. And, furthermore, 
since all men inherit many instinctive modes 
of conduct, and these modes of conduct can- 
not often be balked and suppressed without 
ill-health and disaster, there is a decided 
limit to that "infinite unprovability" even 
of the individual nature. What that limit 
may be, no one can declare in detail. But 
we can wisely assure ourselves that any "im- 
provement" which involves an off-hand sup- 
pression of universal hereditary tendencies, 
will be exceedingly precarious. It will not 
be transmitted in heredity, and it will have 
to depend for its enforcement upon an al- 
most unanimous weight of social tradition, 
for underneath it in the neural structure, 
laid down forever, lie the paths of the old 
tendency it denies. 

So we have to lay aside the mortification 



THE WAY TO END WAR 83 

method of reforming the world as a brave 
and stupendous error. But it is also an 
error to suppose, as the orthodox Socialists 
and Norman Angell incline to, that there 
is but one tendency original in man, the 
tendency to preserve his own economic well- 
being; and to imagine that in proportion as 
his understanding is "enlightened," he will 
invariably act merely as an economic self- 
preserver. The conduct of the anti-military 
workingmen of Europe when the war broke, 
and the conduct of the business pacifist also, 
have made evident the falsity of that as- 
sumption. 

The disposition of European people, 
grouped in nations, to wage war when their 
nation is threatened, and to believe jt is 
threatened upon a very Jight excuse, seems 
to be fixed in the nervous tissue like self- 
preservation itself. Men who would not 
contribute eight cents to anything outside 
of their own belly in times of peace, will 
drop their cash, credit, and commercial 
prospects, and go toss in their lives like a 



84 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

song, in war times, at the bidding of an alien 
abstraction called the state. Do you think 
that is a trick they have acquired by cul- 
ture, and which you can stem by telling them 
something else when they are young? I 
think it is an organic aptitude more old and 
deeply set by evolution than any of the im- 
pulses that would enlighten it. 

War is a functioning of at least two in- 
stinctive dispositions — "pugnacity," and 
"gregariousness," or the "herd-instinct." I 
find in my books of psychology, that the dis- 
position called pugnacity (and that called 
rivalry) lie near the root .of our hereditary 
endowment; and that the tendency of man 
to identify himself with his clan, his tribe, 
his nation, .although of later origin, has been 
grafted deep into the souls of European 
people by centuries of bloody and drastic 
group-selection. These dispositions belong 
to the original nature of man, the unlearned 
nature, fixed by evolution, and inherited 
anew by every child, no matter what intel- 
lectual medium he may be born in. And 



THE WAY TO END WAR 85 

any purely cultural or calculative suppres- 
sion of them would be both temporary and 
unreliable. It would depend upon a per- 
fectly perpetuated tradition, and it would 
never give certainty that when a sufficiently 
poignant occasion arose, the original nature 
would not break through and function in 
spite of all. 

Patriotism is not, as Mr. Angell, from his 
readings of Lecky, supposes, a trait like 
militant religious zeal, which many human 
cultures never have possessed, and which can 
be rooted out in one generation by the 
training of young children. It is a disposi- 
tion that lies fixed in the hereditary struc- 
ture of all civilized races, and neither early 
education nor Mr. Angell's panacea, "hard 
thinking," can remove it. 

That Mr. Angell has no apprehension of 
the difference between the original or "un- 
learned," and the cultural or acquired char- 
acteristics of man, appears clearly in his 
chapter on "Changing Human Nature." * 

* "The Great Illusion," by Norman Angell. 



86 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

He quotes a variety of common sayings 
whose purport is that "you can't change hu- 
man nature." And then he answers in a 
kind of exasperation: 

"What do these phrases mean? These, 
and many like them, are repeated in a know- 
ing way with an air of great wisdom and 
profundity by journalists and writers of re- 
pute, and one may find them blatant any 
day in our newspapers and reviews ; yet the 
most cursory examination proves them to be 
neither wise nor profound, but simply par- 
rot-like phrases, phrases which lack common 
sense, and fly in the face of facts of every- 
day experience." 

But this itself is a rather journalistic re- 
joinder, to those who remember that in the 
laboratories of science steps have already 
been taken to determine in what characters 
and dispositions you can permanently 
change human nature, and in what charac- 
ters *you can not, except by selective breed- 
ing. And most scientists, I believe, would 
agree that a basic disposition to identify self 



THE WAY TO END WAR 87 

with a social group, and to be pugnacious 
in the gregarious way that nations are, is 
one of the unchanging attributes of man. 
Culture can, and doubtless has, inflamed 
and overdeveloped it. A different culture 
can mitigate its strength. But it is there, 
no matter what you teach. You can never 
build a structure of learned attitudes so 
deep and solid that it will not tumble into 
air, when that organic coil is sprung. 

It is not beyond the power of nature to 
produce peaceable types. They occur as 
variants — as reformers often — in our own 
race. And in races whose character has not 
been determined by those savage centuries 
of intertribal war, they may be the dominant 
type. Nansen says of the Esquimaux that, 
"War is quite incomprehensible to them and 
abominable; their language has not even a 
word for it, and soldiers and officers who 
have been trained to the killing of people 
are to them simply butchers of men." 

The struggle of the Esquimaux, through 
the long ages that fixed their character, was 



88 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

a struggle not against a too numerous hu- 
manity, but against a too rigorous environ- 
ment. And for the few that nature would 
let live, a mutual indiscriminate helpful- 
ness was the very condition of their continu- 
ing to live. But for us that mutualness, 
like every other sane engagement of our 
time, must cease and the recoil be instant at 
the note of tribal strife, which always threat- 
ened our existence. And thus we are and 
thus we will be, in spite of all superficial 
changes that cultural suggestion can install, 
militant patriots at heart. 

We International Socialists, in our hope 
that the workingman's patriotism might be 
taught to cling in a crisis to his class in all 
nations, rather than to all classes in his na- 
tion, were nearer than the others to a scien- 
tific hope. We did not seek to suppress or 
deny the patriotic disposition altogether ; we 
offered it a new object. But I think we un- 
derestimated the importance to that dispo- 
sition of personal contact. It is the group 
surrounding us with whom we rush together 



THE WAY TO END WAR 89 

for defence. The abstract thought of kin- 
dred groups in other countries, powerful as 
it may be in times of security, is too chilly 
in the turbulence of impending war to check 
our fighting union with the group we feel. 
That is what this war should teach the So- 
cialists. In that famous faith of theirs that 
solidarity of economic interest among the 
workers of all countries could avert inter- 
national -wars, they nursed a dream. The 
anti-patriots are nursing a dream. And 
those who imagine that disarmament, or 
"popular control," would avert war between 
nations, also are nursing a dream. There 
is nothing so inhuman in the nature of the 
people as that. They will react more slow- 
ly, but not in essential contrast to their dele- 
gates and their rulers. For we are all 
touched with this mania the moment that a 
crisis comes. It is our fate. 

The patriotic and pugnacious tribes sur- 
vived — we are those tribes. Write that 
motto over your peace palaces, your tribu- 
nals, your international congresses, and 



90 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

some result may come of the deliberations 
within. 



There is one method of handling inconven- 
ient instincts, more practical than selec- 
tive breeding, and more sure and permanent 
than cultural suppression. That is to alter 
the environment in such fashion as to of- 
fer new objects for these instincts to ad- 
here to, and similar but less disastrous func- 
tions for them to perform. We are con- 
stantly putting the natural instincts of 
animals to our service in this manner. It 
is not too much to say that the intemperate 
motherhood of the barnyard fowl would be 
a national calamity if we had not found 
means to direct it into the .rather unusual 
channel of perennial egg-production. The 
murderous impulses of the cat become dis- 
tinctly moral when a house is her environ- 
ment, because whatever she can find there 
that is small enough we are eager to have 
her kill. 

Something of that is the lesson we must 



THE WAY TO END WAR 91 

learn in dealing with the savage hered- 
ity of men. Men are incurably rivalrous 
and pugnacious, but this rivalry arid pug- 
nacity would find vent in other forms of 
conflict and display, if the occasions of in- 
ternational warfare were removed. And 
for that reason all anti-military effort ought 
to be directed, not to a Utopian reform of 
native human attributes, but to a practical 
alteration of the external mechanisms 
through which war is engendered. 

But men are also incurably patriotic — 
destined to identify themselves with a so- 
cial group surrounding them, whatever 
group has a strong traditional existence. 
And by identify themselves is meant all that 
the words can mean. Their nation is their 
self. And for this reason even those ex- 
ternal reforms such as a Concert of Pow- 
ers, Reduction of Armaments, Territorial 
Changes, Democratic Control of Foreign 
Policy, Abolition of Indemnities, and the 
Removal of Economic Barriers can not be 
depended upon to prevent the starting of a 



92 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

fight. Eights will start between nations a 
little more ponderously perhaps, but in ex- 
actly the same manner as they start between 
selves. 

The Kafir people have two words for a 
self. The idhlozi is "the individual and per- 
sonal spirit born with each child," while the 
itongo is "the ancestral and corporate spirit 
which is not personal but tribal, or a thing 
of the clan, the possession of which is ob- 
tained not by birth but by certain initiatory 
rights." And the Kafirs merely focus in 
these common nouns something that is to be 
seen in all the peoples that we call civilized. 

I could summon my gentle neighbor, Mr. 
Cogley, out of his house, and inform him 
that a certain Mr. Hohenzollern of Ger- 
many desires to prevent him, Mr. Cogley, 
if necessary by force of arms, from riding 
into England on a British ship carrying 
certain articles. Mr. Cogley, as I know him, 
would reply: 

"Oh, all right! I don't know the gen- 
tleman, but if he feels that way I'd just as 



THE WAY TO END WAR 93 

soon ride on one of our own ships. I wasn't 
going to England anyway!" 

That is Mr. Cogley's idhlozi speaking. 
But when I inform him that his clan is to 
be prevented from riding into England on 
a British ship, or from any other little thing 
they may proudly please to do, by the clan 
Hohenzollern, then my neighbor's itongo 
grasps hold of his mind, and it will actually 
carry his body into the trenches to face 
death over that inconspicuous and to him 
altogether inconsequent proposition. That 
is the way in which patriotism, which is a 
belligerent self-identification with the group, 
actually possesses the actions of men at the 
least occasion. Can we meet that with lit- 
tle tinkerings and trimmings up of the skirts 
of nations? 

There is but one peace plan which has 
practical hope and cogency: Offer that in- 
stinct of self-identification a larger group 
to which it may cling. It clings more strong- 
ly now to the United States, which has not 
even a name of its own, than to Massachu- 



94 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

setts or Rhode Island. And we already in 
our loyal moments call these United States 
"America." America itself might command 
the strength of our loyalty, if America as an 
integral group existed for us. The name of 
our country is the name of our task. 

A conference of Independent American 
Republics, looking to the preservation of 
their common interests, would be most natu- 
ral at this time. Four semi-official Pan- 
American congresses have already, in fact, 
been held. A fifth could be made official. 
And if our statesmen at such a congress 
proved far-sighted enough to relinquish on 
this continent every form of that dominance 
which they so deprecate in the European 
ambitions of Germany or England, there 
might evolve out of it the beginnings of the 
American Federation. This must become a 
true Federation, a supra-national entity 
with power and delegated sovereignty like 
those of our federal government. It must 
have a congress of representatives, who can 
express and adjudicate the differences be- 



THE WAY TO END WAR 95 

tween nations, and thus engender above 
them a conspicuous state to which a por- 
tion of that tribal loyalty that so controls 
their citizens may learn to adhere. In such 
an absolute creation — and in all the activi- 
ties and thoughts and moods of international 
unity, which lead towards it — lies the one 
hope of destroying war. 

There is a blind wisdom in the attitude 
of those who advocate national defence, now 
that they see how lightly a monstrous war 
can arise. They will not ignore the fact, 
and they wish to do something about it. 
Who does not wish to do something? And 
''Peace" is nothing. Peace is a negation. 
Nobody will ever wage peace. Nobody but 
a few tired people, and people suffering 
from shock, will ever kindle to a negative 
ideal. American Union, International 
Union, the Union of the World — that is an 
ideal that has action and affirmation and 
distance in it. It is a campaign that can be 
waged. It is a campaign, moreover, the 
very first steps of which — a conferring and 



96 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

uniting of American Republics — offers the 
bold and economical substitute for that in- 
finitely multiplying labor of national de- 
fence which threatens our progress. 

We are lucky indeed to find in the ulti- 
mate dissolver of international wars, an 
aim which can appeal to so many immedi- 
ate interests of our time. International un- 
ion will appeal to the millions who know that 
increasing our own armament at this time of 
the world's tragedy is a crime, and yet are 
at a loss for some affirmative program with 
which to oppose it. It will appeal to the 
growing power of international capital, 
which has already learned that its interests 
lie in preserving peace, and is only waiting 
to learn by what political mechanism it can 
protect them. It will appeal to the labor 
movement in all countries, less powerful, 
less international, but already committed to 
a creed of internationalism. It will appeal 
to that new social force, the will of inde- 
pendent women, who, especially in the ab- 
sence of war, are disposed more strongly 



THE WAY TO END WAR 97 

against it than men. The times were never 
more ready and expectant of a great in- 
itiator. President Wilson holds this hope 
of the future, for the moment, in his 
hands. 

It is a distant hope, and many wars may 
intervene before the habit of loyalty to a 
greater state is fixed in our traditions. But 
it is a true hope; no science contradicts it. 

Ultimately our patriotism may embrace 
the earth, the earth be our nation, and we 
go out to fight the enemies of what we deem 
a terrestrial well-being. There is nothing 
Utopian in that. But to hope that patriot- 
ism can be cut out of the nervous organi- 
zation of the true-bred man of the west, or 
that war, which is both the parent and the 
child of patriotism, can be made so horri- 
ble to him whose ancestral food was war — 
that is utopian. 



WHAT IS PATRIOTISM AND 

WHAT SHALL WE DO 

WITH IT? 

PATRIOTISM has always figured in 
literature as a virtue, except in Tol- 
stoy's writings, where it figures as a vice, 
which is much the same thing. All you can 
do with patriotism as a virtue or a vice is 
preach at it. And preaching at human na- 
ture, preaching that never takes the scien- 
tific trouble to decide what is the origin and 
composition and actual potentiality of the 
traits preached at, may be said to have 
proven a complete failure. For twenty cen- 
turies almost all of the professional ideal- 
ists of Europe have been trying to change 
the instinctive nature of man by blowing 
salvation oratory down his throat, and Eu- 

This essay is in substance a speech delivered at Cooper Union 
in November, 1915, in a Conference on the Future Foreign Policy 
of the United States. It was written shortly after the preceding 
essay, and although it merely repeats the moral, it adds a great 
deal of truth, I believe, to the analysis there attempted of the 
instinctive emotions of patriotism. 

98 



WHAT IS PATRIOTISM? 99 

rope is now demonstrating the futility of 
that endeavor. 

"Resist not evil; but whosoever shall 
smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him 
the other also." There, for instance, is 
an ideal which is so far disgeared from the 
actual running mechanism of a man's nerves 
that, unless he intends to hypnotize himself 
abnormally with that single God's dogma 
for life, he never can live up to it, and he 
never will. To preach that principle to the 
choleric and belligerent races of Western 
Europe, as a solution of the problems of 
their uproarious civilization, is a vicious 
thing because it is a crying waste of the en- 
ergy of idealism. 

If those same professional idealists — I 
mean the priests and ministers and moral- 
ists and poets of morality — instead of try- 
ing to alter with exhortation the instinctive 
nature of man, had once sat down to de- 
termine what the unalterable facts of that 
nature are, and then tried to construct a 
world in which such a nature could func- 



100 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

tion without disaster, European civilization 
might be in existence now. 

With proper .recognition of the possible 
variation of individuals, we can say that 
patriotism is one of these unalterable facts 
of man's nature. A talent for fighting soli- 
darity with a group is a part of the instinc- 
tive equipment of the human animal. It is 
composed of two tendencies that are laid 
down in his nervous system when he is born ; 
and these two tendencies are reinforced in 
a peculiar way by two others still more 
compelling. 

The first two are called pugnacity and 
gregariousness, or group-loyalty. All men 
and most animals are pugnacious. They 
love to fight. Everybody loves to fight. 
Some people get all the fighting they want 
at the breakfast table, and other people have 
to carry it out in the law courts or the bat- 
tlefield, where it makes more noise. Roose- 
velt loves to charge up San Juan hill, and 
then he loves to prosecute for libel any- 
body that says he didn't charge up San 



WHAT IS PATRIOTISM? 101 

Juan hill. War people fight for war and 
peace people fight for peace. When Roose- 
velt calls the peace people mollycoddles and 
college sissies, I only want to walk up and 
smash him. 

Not only does everybody like to fight, but 
everybody has an irresistible tendency to 
identify himself with a group. Boys fight 
in gangs, and so do girls, and wolves, and 
cows, and elephants, and yellow j ackets, and 
grown-up people. You don't have to prod 
every single individual in order to bring a 
bee-hive around your head. You only have 
to prod the hive. Every individual identi- 
fies himself with the hive. 

It is exactly so with a swarm of people 
trained by custom and habit to think them- 
selves one — one family, one fraternity, one 
church, one clan, one tribe, one nation. 
Love me, love my dog. Love my dog, love 
the whole pack. That is the way we work. 
We identify ourselves with the larger 
group; and we do this especially when the 
group is subjected to any kind of prod from 



102 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

an outsider. Patriotism was born of war. 
It was born of the necessity of uniting for 
common defense, and although a great many 
different feelings, some heroic and some 
feeble-minded, have got mixed up with the 
word patriotism, the basic sentiment is still 
one of fighting solidarity — rivalry and loy- 
alty combined. 

These two tendencies, I said, are rein- 
forced by two others still more compelling. 
And those are self-love and child-love. By 
child-love I mean the disposition of men and 
women to return in times of trouble to the 
affections and passions which swayed them 
when they were very young. There is a lit- 
tle child inside of every one of us, and when 
anything gets the matter he always wants 
to run home to mother. Or he wants to 
run home to father, or sister, or brother, 
or nurse, or the nursery, or the old home- 
stead, or the home town, or "my native 
land," as the case may be. He wants to 
get back to the things he was sure of, the 
things he loved and leaned on in the days 



WHAT IS PATRIOTISM? 103 

when there was no doubt and no trouble. 
For these, as for no others, he will pour out 
his song and his sacrifice. 

That is an important element of patriot- 
ism. It is what explains the queer, blind, 
puppy-like, almost chemical way in which 
otherwise intelligent minds will cling to the 
proposition that their country is right, no 
matter what their country does, and no mat- 
ter if it does two exactly opposite things at 
the same time. It is the romantic part of 
patriotism, the part that comes before the 
hyphen. It is not usually so strong as the 
part that comes after the hyphen, but you 
can not always tell how much of this sacred 
baby-love there is in a man by looking at 
him. 

I know of two German brothers in Jer- 
sey City who came over here fifteen or 
twenty years ago, and built up a ten-mil- 
lion-dollar business. After they had been 
here about five years one of them, the ag- 
gressive one, decided to become an Ameri- 
can citizen. The other said: "No, I'll stick 



104 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

by de Vaterland." When the war broke, 
the one who had been an American citizen 
for ten years, packed up his kit and took 
the first boat back to fight; and the one 
who had "stuck by de Vaterland" stayed 
over in Jersey City in the vicinity of that 
ten million dollars. You can not always 
tell. Generally speaking, however, when 
there is a choice, the part of patriotism that 
comes before the hyphen is not so strong 
as the part that comes after. Yet it is un- 
canny strong. Men cling to the place they 
were born in, as they clung to the breast 
that bore them. 

Still more inconquerably, however, they 
cling to themselves, and the noble task of 
increasing their own importance. And that 
is the ultimate driving power of patriotism. 
Nobody can understand the overwhelming 
force of the conviction people have that 
their country is the greatest country in the 
world; that it has the bravest soldiers, the 
prettiest women, the tallest church steeples, 
the biggest hotels, the best cooks, the most 



WHAT IS PATRIOTISM? 105 

commodious bathrooms, the fattest hogs, the 
longest ears on its jackasses — nobody can 
understand that, who does not see that pa- 
triotic people are praising themselves. I 
saw in the gallery of war pictures in Paris 
a drawing by Forain of two starved and 
destitute hoboes dragging along the road- 
side discussing the war. 

"We're bound to win in the long run," 
said one. 

"Sure!" said the other, with a magnilo- 
quent gesture, "we're so rich!" 

It is that patrotic "we" that slides in and 
corrupts everybody's judgment, gets peo- 
ple to give up their happiness, and their 
lives, and their children's happiness, and 
their children's lives, over a point that does 
not concern them the least bit in the world. 
It concerns their imaginary self-import- 
ance.* 

* These two elements, the love and the egotism that swell the 
patriot's breast, are mingled in varying proportions not only in indi- 
viduals, but in whole nations. The prevailing temper of South 
European patriotism — French and Italian — and of Irish patriotism, 
too, I think, is love of country. The prevailing temper in England 
and Germany and the United States is pride of country. The 
French are not so zealous to prove that every great thing in the 
world, or almost every one, originated in France. They leave that 
to us Northerners. It is enough for them that France is France. 



106 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

Churches are supposed to be put up by 
the people to the glory of God, but when 
they get them put up how often do they 
call them God's House, and how often do 
they call them Our Church? If a man can 
not afford to have a steeple on his own hat, 
he is so much the more proud and anxious 
about the size and proportions of the town 
hall and the village church. You can make 
that a mathematical rule. 

Well — that is what makes patriotism so 
insidiously coercive of our reasonable judg- 
ment. It combines the strongest possible 
appeal to altruism, the appeal of infant 
memories, with the strongest possible appeal 
to egoism, the chance to behold ourselves 
enlarged and clothed in public splendor. In 
patriotism we have both the emotion of los- 
ing ourselves, which has been celebrated by 
the saints in all ages, and the emotion of 
magnifying ourselves so large that there is 
no possible danger of our getting lost, which 
is more enjoyable if not so celebrated. 

That combination of remarkable emo- 



WHAT IS PATRIOTISM? 107 

tional satisfactions is irresistible. Add that 
to the pleasure of fulfilling an hereditary 
instinct, the pleasure of sliding over those 
tracks that are laid down in our brain-mat- 
ter, greased and oiled and waiting to be slid 
over — what I have called instinct of pug- 
nacity, instinct of gregariousness — add 
those four things together, and you have a 
trait of character that no pledge or resolu- 
tion, no theory, no gospel, no poetry or phil- 
osophy of life, no culture or education, and 
not even your own financial interest can 
ever completely conquer. 

Patriotism is a fighting self-identifica- 
tion with the gang, the tribe, the nation. 
It is there in our human hearts forever. 
What shall we do with it? 

Tinker the tariff. Reduce armaments. 
Remove economic barriers. Abolish indem- 
nities. Liberate the colonies. Suppress the 
diplomats. Establish a popular control. 
Give women the vote. Consolidate the 
working-class. Yes, all of that! But will 
that prevent the starting of a fight between 



108 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

patriotic people divided into exclusive na- 
tional groups? I do not believe it will. 

Wars will be less frequent if some of 
these intelligent reforms are accomplished; 
in many ways that can be proven. But the 
perpetual menace and the occasional calam- 
ity will not be removed. For so long as peo- 
ple identify their selves only with their na- 
tions, fights will start between nations some- 
what as they start between selves. And 
fights are known to start between selves 
without the mediation of economic difficul- 
ties, or armaments, or colonies, or ignorant 
diplomats, or kings, or emperors, or any of 
those notorious scapegoats upon which we 
are trying to load off the blame for a catas- 
trophe whose cause inheres in our own char- 
acter. 

Wars will arise between nations so long 
as the instinct of fighting loyalty is allowed 
to attach exclusively to nations. And as 
soon as, and in proportion as, we offer to 
that instinct larger groups to which it may 
attach, wars among nations will become less 



WHAT IS PATRIOTISM? 109 

and less likely. We shall eliminate national 
war by international union, exactly as the 
wars of family and clan and city were elimi- 
nated by national union. That is all we can 
say. That is all we can do with a trait 
which is hereditary. We can not ignore it; 
we can not mortify it; we can not preach it 
away, we can not pray it away, and we can 
not even reason it away. It is there like 
a mouth which is bound to be fed. But we 
can feed it a slightly different food. We 
can offer it a different object to cling to. 

The patriotism of the people in New 
England clings more firmly now to the 
United States, than it does to Massachu- 
setts or Rhode Island, and a war between 
those two states is hardly conceivable. The 
longer the United States endures, the less 
likely does a war between the states become. 

And yet what is the United States? An 
artificial institution that was created off- 
hand, for the express purpose of absorbing 
a little of that excess colonial patriotism that 
was sure to make trouble. 



110 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

Last summer a Frenchman asked me 
where I came from, and I said, "The United 
States," and he said, "Which United States? 
Say, why don't you people name your coun- 
try?" 

And that is just what we have tried to 
do; and by a happy accident, in our most 
patriotic moments, we call this artificial unit 
of loyalty — America. Why not make it 
America? I put it to you as a fact guar- 
anteed by the science of psychology that if 
some intelligent person with power would 
take the first steps toward a federation of 
the American republics, it need not be fifty 
years before half of the patriotic devotion 
of all the people on this side of the world 
would be consecrated to the task of perpetu- 
ating it. 

And though it seems gigantic, it is by no 
means a Utopian undertaking to unite the 
whole world of nations in such a federa- 
tion. For all the organic interests of men, 
except their sheer love of patriotic fighting 
itself, are against the perpetual recurrence 



WHAT IS PATRIOTISM? Ill 

of international war. War and the mere 
joy of existence are incompatible. War 
makes it impossible to live, and it makes 
it impossible even to die for a noble pur- 
pose. Let men but understand themselves, 
and the mechanism of their emotions by 
which they are brought into this perennial 
catastrophe, and they will be ready enough 
in the sober intervals to take gigantic meas- 
ures to prevent it. 



NOTE. 

Norman Angell has demonstrated the futility, from any point of 
view but military pride, of national victory in a typical modern 
war* Assuming that war is conducted at an enormous cost to a 
nation, he has proven that the gains, even with brilliant military 
success, are not worth such a cost. Especially from the economic 
view-point, his demonstrations are a surprise. He states, and I 
think pretty generally proves, that no nation gains much in wealth 
through the typical military victory. 

But his assumption that war is conducted at an enormous cost to 
a nation, remains still to be analysed. It might be true that while 
victory is futile, war itself is a good business. It certainly is true 
that war is not so bad a business as people who think only about 
the extravagant shooting conceive. And it is also true that a great 
many individuals in a warring nation do grow richer through the 
very fact of war. They may not grow richer at the ex- 
pense of other nations, but they grow richer at the expense of 
other classes in their own nation. And the question we have to 
ask is, whether the business class as a whole (the capital-owning 
class) grows richer through the manufacture of war. For if it 
does, then so far as the hopes of peace go, the question whether 
victory harms or benefits "the nation" is not of final importance. 
Indeed the less that hazard amounts to, the more blithely will nations 
go to war. For in most cases the business class is "the nation," so 
far as sovereign decision upon the most critical issues is concerned; 
and if war, merely as war, transfers an increased proportion of the 
wealth from other classes to the business-class, without greatly de- 
creasing the total amount, then war remains a good "national" 
business, no matter whether victory is worth anything or not. 

For this reason, I have included the following very syncopated 
reflections in this book. I do rely, in my hope of international 
federation, upon capitalistic interest for the main driving power, 
but I do not want those who are in closer communion with capital 
than I, to think that I have simply adopted without any doubt or 
speculation, the popular impression about war's cost. 

* In "The Great Illusion," G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York. 



THE BUSINESS COST OF 
WAR 

WAR is a luxury, and if any one of 
us alone indulged in it, he would 
find it very expensive. But when the en- 
tire community goes in for war, the busi- 
ness result is not so damaging as we im- 
agine. Barring the chances of indemnity 
and territorial loss, and barring the occur- 
rence of a blockade and certain other ac- 
cidents, the manufacture and distribution 
of war seems to be almost as profitable to 
the capitalists of a nation as any other busi- 
ness. 

In the case of most luxuries, the people 
who manufacture them are also the people 
who consume them. But in the case of war 
the entire community is taxed to pay the 
price, poor people depriving themselves of 
necessaries in order to join in the general 

indulgence. This makes the poor people 
113 



114 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

think of war as a bad business, but to those 
who produce the material they are consum- 
ing, it is, for just this reason, extraordi- 
narily good business. And almost all the 
great mines and farms and factories are di- 
rectly or indirectly producing such material. 

Of course there are contrary luxuries 
which sell better in times of peace, and those 
who were rich in the manufacture of these 
luxuries begin to lose money when war is 
declared. But others immediately begin to 
gain from the new luxury, so that this is 
no loss to the business class. It is merely 
a slight redistribution of their income, and 
these redistributions of income ought not to 
mislead us into believing there is a general 
loss. 

War looks improvident, too, because guns 
go off so quickly when you fire them; gun- 
powder and all the other munitions are con- 
sumed at such a rapid tempo. But the 
truth is that an enormously rapid consump- 
tion of goods which the entire community 
will pay a good price for, and labor is ar- 



BUSINESS COST OF WAR 115 

dently willing to produce, is the very name 
and picture of prosperity to the owners of 
productive capital. War simply as a whole- 
sale consumption of luxuries, stimulates the 
entire enterprise of a country, and piles up 
wealth for the wealthy as usual. 

Of course a certain destruction of pro- 
ductive capital is entailed, if the scene of 
battle moves within the home territory. 
Railroads are torn up, factories and farm 
buildings destroyed. But this merely ac- 
celerates a process which the ordinary use 
of these objects involves. They have to be 
replaced quite frequently in the ordinary 
course of business, and they are not diffi- 
cult to replace when people know how to 
work and have a will to it. There is rea- 
son to believe that at the end of a war peo- 
ple know how to work so much better than 
they did at the beginning, the technique 
and the organization are so exalted, that 
this loss of capital is more than counterbal- 
anced. Technology is the real fountain of 
value. 



116 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

Bismarck was chagrined at the rapidity 
with which France paid off the enormous 
indemnity of 1870. He thought he had 
crippled France for a century. But it ap- 
pears that ultimately he increased her wealth 
by bestowing upon her people that red-hot 
incentive to work. War itself is another 
such incentive, because it appeals to our 
hereditary instincts far more effectually 
than wage-working for another's profit in 
times of peace. 

The one thing about war which really 
makes a business brain sad, is to see so many 
healthy laborers march out of the produc- 
ing mill, and take to the merely consuming 
sport of shooting off guns. Anything that 
makes the poor people quit producing ap- 
pears a bad business policy. But here 
again, to judge by the experience of Eu- 
rope, patriotism compensates the loss, for 
so many previously idle and dependent peo- 
ple come forward to help (at about the usual 
wage) and they try so hard, that the an- 
nual production of wealth is soon actually 



BUSINESS COST OF WAR 117 

increased to meet the increased consump- 
tion at the front. 

There remains then, only one enormous 
unqualified loss that war, merely as war, 
inflicts upon the business of a country, and 
that is the price of the labor power that is 
shot down or disabled forever. This loss 
is increasing to serious proportions with the 
growth of the size of war, but it too is in 
some degree compensated by the patriotism 
of those who remain. And it is more quick- 
ly replaced than those who suffer when they 
think of it are inclined to imagine. Na- 
ture is always at work, and in less than a 
score of years she can fill all those unsightly 
vacancies with good flesh and muscle of 
youth. 

It is a sad fact to those who hate war 
upon more serious grounds, but it is a fact 
that upon the grounds of national business 
war is not altogether an insane enterprise. 
We should recognize this, however, and not 
allow the mere incident of taxation and a 
national debt (which are only forms of capi- 



118 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

talistic book-keeping) to delude us into 
thinking we have more interests than we have 
on the side of peace. War is an industry 
which gives a vast profit, like all flourishing 
industry, to those who are in on the owner- 
ship of the producing machines. 

There are two considerations, however, 
which incline the more far-seeing and wide- 
ly interested capitalist to oppose interna- 
tional war. The first of these is the enor- 
mous uncertainty of events in war time. 
The indemnity, the cession of territory, the 
blockade, the eventualities of a foreign loan 
— these are only the more obvious accidents 
to which the war business is liable. But 
everything is uncertain. Peace breaking 
out unexpectedly would depreciate a great 
many heavy investments. A revolution of 
the people, or even an earnest request for 
some share in the profits of their patriotism, 
would be disturbing. A repudiation of the 
national debt, while it would not involve 
any loss of value to the nation, would up- 
set all that capitalistic book-keeping in an 



BUSINESS COST OF WAR 119 

exceedingly disrespectful manner. It 
would, in fact, constitute a revolutionary re- 
distribution of wealth. In brief, the tech- 
nique of making profits through the exploi- 
tation of labor rests securely upon the psy- 
chology and politics of peace, and whether 
the prizes of war-business are worth the ex- 
treme risks involved in a whole new set of 
conditions, is decidedly a debatable question. 
I believe that the weight of opinion in any 
flourishing, and therefore conservative, na- 
tional business would, in general and even 
aside from any humane considerations, lie 
against it. 

But the supreme force that will oppose 
war is the interest of those whose business is 
not national at all, but international. It is 
obvious that those who own and operate a 
business, which in its essential nature trans- 
gresses the boundaries of two nationalities, 
are destined to oppose war between those 
two up to the last hour. And the fact that 
ownership and enterprise are growing more 
and more international, that the dominant 



120 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

groups of financiers and capitalists in all 
the great countries are interlocking, offers 
the one almighty hope for the elimination of 
war. National competitors are learning the 
lesson of private competitors — the lesson of 
the trusts. We are told that the two great 
financial organs of Germany opposed the 
declaration of war as vigorously up to the 
last moment as the organs of the Social 
Democracy. And this was the most hope- 
ful piece of news we received, for these or- 
gans represent the power of the near future, 
and the Kaiser does not. 

World federation will doubtless arrive in 
the usual sequence of beneficent changes. 
First the humane and beautiful ideal of the 
moralist and poet; then the gradual develop- 
ment of the substance of the thing in busi- 
ness; then as dictated by the interests of 
business the seizure of that ideal and its in- 
corporation in a political form that will 
guarantee the values developed; and then 
once again the psalms of the poet and mor- 
alist in praise of the status quo. It was so 



BUSINESS COST OF WAR 121 

with the federation of the German Nation 
— first Fichte, then the Tariff Union, then 
the Empire, and then the literature of self- 
praise. It will be so, we can assure our- 
selves, with the Federation of the World. 
We have already the poets and the moral 
ideal; we have the business motive in its 
early growth. We can add now something 
which will accelerate the sequence. We can 
add the scientific idealist who understands 
its motivation, and knows just where to 
place his help. 



WAR PSYCHOLOGY AND IN- 
TERNATIONAL SOCIALISM 

WAGE-WORKING people have no 
property and no privilege to defend 
in fighting for their country. They have 
very little fun living in it. And for that 
reason it seems natural they should be the 
ones to refuse to fight. Almost every paci- 
fist looked to the working-classes of Eu- 
rope, organized under the standard of inter- 
nationalism, to prevent a world war. It 
seemed incredible that so many millions of 
"rational animals," conscious of their class, 
should go out and die for a country which 
furnished them nothing but a bare living. 
It was not good sense, and it was not good 
economics. 

Nevertheless they did. And besides pain- 
fully disappointing many optimistic hearts, 

In this essay, again, I repeat the moral of "The Only Way to 
End War," but with special reference to Socialist theories upon the 
same subject. 

122 



WAR PSYCHOLOGY 123 

they have thrown certain severely theoreti- 
cal minds out of their tracks. The Euro- 
pean Socialists — and those of Germany es- 
pecially — have been warmly denounced as 
traitors to the cause by thinkers who had 
coldly counted upon "economic determin- 
ism" to make them loyal to it. It is not 
very scientific to denounce a fact for refus- 
ing to come under your hypothesis. It is 
wiser to scrutinize the fact with a view to 
remodelling, if necessary, the hypothesis. 
And that is what I wish to do with the fact 
of human nature revealed in the Socialist 
workingman's support of a nationalistic 
war.* Does it mean that the motives of na- 
tionalism lie deeper than the economic in- 
terests? Does it counsel us to give up the 
ideal of an "international" that will survive 
a serious war crisis? Or does it merely 
mean that our internationalists were not yet 
as powerful or as conscious of their class as 
we had thought, and were overwhelmed by 

* In "The Socialists and the War," William English Walling 
has compiled, with admirable impartiality, _ documents which reveal 
the wartime reactions of Socialist majorities and minorities in all 
the countries involved. 



124. UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

the public opinion propagated through a na- 
tionalistic press ? Shall we still look to them 
for the abolition of war? 

To my mind there has always been a 
crack in the argument that workingmen 
should oppose war because they have no 
property to defend. It implies that other 
people go to war to defend their property. 
And while in the ancient days of conquest, 
the romantic wars we remember, this was 
often true, in the actual conflicts of modern 
nations it hardly ever is. A defeat or a 
victory in modern war involves no change of 
property-holdings drastic enough to make 
millions endanger their lives. People do not 
go to war for their property, they go to 
war for their country. And though their 
property and privileges undoubtedly en- 
hanced in the first place their love of coun- 
try, still these things were not the basis of 
it. People were patriotic, in the sense of a 
fighting loyalty to their tribe, before they 
were propertied ; and they continue to be pa- 
triotic after they have been robbed of their 



WAR PSYCHOLOGY 125 

property with the help of the government. 
This fact has been ignored by those im- 
mersed in the economic interpretation, be- 
cause the instinctive nature of man was not 
discovered until after economics got well un- 
der way. But we might as well acknowl- 
edge it now. The motive to patriotic fight- 
ing is not a mere derivative from business 
interest; it is a native impulse of our con- 
stitutions. The backbone of the sentiment 
of patriotism is hereditary. This does not 
prove that international propaganda and 
Socialist education cannot do anything to it, 
but it gives a true and far more difficult pic- 
ture of what they have to do. 

One of the characteristics of the human 
inheritance is that it has a wide range of 
variation in different individuals. And thus 
although we can assert that man is in gen- 
eral a patriotic animal, we shall find all 
types of men, ranging from the utter anti- 
patriot to the maniac- jingo. Among the 
European Socialists a good many were 
found who could vigorously resist the patri- 



126 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

otic stampede, and we were more than sur- 
prised to discover who some of them were. 
In England and France and Russia the 
most "revolutionary" leaders of the Social- 
ists — those who had been readiest to fight 
the government and the bourgeois society 
— were the first to turn patriot when the war 
broke. Those who had been "reformist" 
(which is to say "mollycoddle") in time of 
peace, held out more bitterly against the 
government's war. This makes us think the 
revolutionaryness of some people is more 
temperamental than reasoned. They have a 
great predilection for fighting, and when a 
resounding fight is on, why postpone their 
satisfaction into the future? 

In Germany, on the other hand, it was the 
uncompromising revolutionaries who stood 
out against the patriot's war. Karl Lieb- 
knecht, Rosa Luxemburg, Clara Zetkin, and 
their four or five hundred thousand follow- 
ers seem to have lived according to what 
they knew before August, 1914. They still 
know it, they still perceive it, they are still 



WAR PSYCHOLOGY 127 

ready, so far as they are able, to act upon 
it with intelligence. Karl Liebknecht's ad- 
dress to the Reichstag when he alone voted 
"no" on the war-loan of December 2, 1914, 
is a document of heroic significance. It is 
high proof of the power of intellect to re- 
sist the suggestions of an almighty social 
environment.* For Liebknecht not only de- 
fied the patriotic state, but he defied the 
whole officialdom of the Socialist party as 
well, whose rule was strict that Socialist 
members should vote as a unit, and those 
who could not vote with them should abstain 
from voting. We have proof here of the 

* "This war, which none of the peoples interested wanted, was 
not declared in the interests of the Germans or of any other people. 
It is an imperialist war for capitalization and domination of the 
world markets, for political domination of important quarters of 
the globe, and for the benefit of bankers and manufacturers. From 
the viewpoint of the race of armaments, it is a preventive war 
provoked conjointly by the war parties of Germany and Austria in 
the obscurity of semi-absolutism and secret diplomacy. It is also a 
Bonaparte-like enterprise tending to demoralize and destroy the 
growing labor movement. That much is clear despite the cynical 
stage management designed to mislead the people. This is not a 
defensive war. We cannot believe the government when it declares 
it is for the defense of the fatherland. It demands money. What 
we must demand is an early peace, humiliating no one, peace without 
consequent rancor. All efforts directed to this end ought to be 
supported. Only the continuous, simultaneous affirmation of this 
wish in all the belligerent countries can end the bloody massacre 
before all the interested people are exhausted. The only durable 
peace will be peace based on the solidarity of the working classes 
and liberty. The Socialists of all countries must work for such a 
peace even during the war. I protest against the violation of 
Belgium and Luxemburg, against the annexation schemes, against 
military dictatorship, against the complete forgetfulness of social and 
political duties as shown by the government ruling classes." 



128 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

highest possibilities of anti-patriotic hero- 
ism in times of war — a dauntless rationality 
such as the economic interpretation calls for. 

There are then two kinds of Socialist 
leaders who have been able to resist the war 
panic — those whose idealism is soft, who hate 
fighting, and those of unusually intellectual 
motivation, who know too much to be pa- 
triotic to a state they wish to revolutionize. 
Both types of character are rather unusual. 
The majority of men are pugnacious in their 
patriotism, and few indeed are profoundly 
influenced in a crisis of feeling by what they 
know. For my part, though the utmost ad- 
miration goes to Liebknecht, and much to 
Ramsay Macdonald and the Socialist mem- 
bers of the Duma, I do not think their ex- 
ample offers a great hope that the masses 
of men will ever in a crisis of "national dan- 
ger," control their patriotic reflexes in the 
interest of the international solidarity of 
labor. 

The only country in which the rank and 
file of working people have shown a rebel- 



WAR PSYCHOLOGY 129 

lious mood against the government's war is 
England. This may be a little because 
England gives a minus nothing to her work- 
ing people, a little because free speech is 
free in England, but more generally, I be- 
lieve, it is because the war did not appear 
to be England's war. Geographically she 
was not involved, and though her national 
pride of position was, this did not obviously 
appear. Her high moral pretense in enter- 
ing the war would be disgusting to any 
moral person. And so it was not difficult 
to find British workmen refusing to help, 
and saying amazingly unpatriotic true 
things about the government's war. There 
would be few of these independent bodies 
left, we can imagine, if England were once 
cleanly invaded by a hostile army. It would 
be as it was in France and Belgium — hardly 
a murmur of anti-state or anti-war from any 
revolutionist. And yet in either of these 
countries, in Belgium above all, it would 
have been good economics for the working 
people to withhold their hands from war. 






130 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

What we know, if we would but formu- 
late it, is that ordinary human nature may- 
feel international and pacific before a war, 
or even during a war; but at the outbreak 
of war the instinctive animal gets loose. At 
this date, after two years of fighting, one- 
third of the French Socialists in conference 
are against the war. Eugene Longuet, the 
grandson of Karl Marx, who explained to 
me in Paris last June the ideal necessity of 
nationalistic war, is against it now. He is 
unpopular. He has recovered his revolu- 
tionary wits. In Germany, which was not 
invaded, the recovery was more rapid. In 
December, 1914, Rosa Luxemburg in a 
greeting to the British Socialists declared 
that "already after a few months of war, 
the jingo intoxication which animated the 
working classes of Germany is passing away 
. . . their sense is returning." This 
same process of intoxication and recovery I 
watched in a Russian Terrorist of my ac- 
quaintance, who was caught up in a fever 
of patriotism for the Russia whose national 



WAR PSYCHOLOGY 131 

power she had fought with fire and dyna- 
mite. Even so far away from her people, it 
was months before her mind could transcend 
the feeling that, revolution or not, she must 
fight the patriotic war. When those who 
carry bombs, go to battle for the czar, we 
can be sure there is something astir in the 
masses besides economic bad judgment! 

What we have to learn from the Euro- 
pean experiment is that war-time psychol- 
ogy is a thing of its own kind. It is com- 
parable to a stampede, or a sexual or reli- 
gious orgy. This tribal fighting loyalty is 
an organized instinct latent in us, and any 
time that we are jogging along most rea- 
sonably attending to our self-interested 
business, the storm may hit us and we get 
into a frenzy of sacrificial patriotism. The 
problem is not merely to oppose a falsely 
conceived interest, with the truth of the mat- 
ter; we have to oppose an instinctive emo- 
tional spasm, and if the spasm is extreme, 
truth is a wholly inadequate corrective. It 
is extreme when one's country is actually 



132 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

invaded, and it is extreme also when the 
enemy is near, and the menace of invasion 
is, or can be made to appear, imminent. I 
do not believe that the thoroughest teach- 
ing of class-conscious internationalism will 
ever produce an average human nature 
among workingmen that can withstand the 
panic of patriotism so inflamed. For ideas 
do not reach down to these instinctive levels, 
and only where the instinct is abnormally 
weak (as in the extreme pacifist) or where 
the ideation is abnormally strong (as in the 
intellectual hero) can we expect our phil- 
osophy to survive that excitation of the or- 
ganic nature. The masses of mankind will 
support war, whenever in any menace of 
danger to the national prestige, real or ap- 
parent, war is declared. That is the con- 
clusion I draw from the trying out of our 
theories in all the countries of Europe. 

The practical indications of this opinion 
are three-fold. 

First, we ought to concentrate our efforts 
upon the anti-military propaganda. If the 



WAR PSYCHOLOGY 133 

war psychology overthrows our economic 
wisdom, we must make the most of that 
wisdom in times of peace. We must pre- 
vent these elaborate war preparations which 
we can quietly see to be a waste of our 
money. We must coldly calculate that the 
danger of going into an unavoidable war 
ill-prepared, is preferable to the danger of 
going into an avoidable war just because 
we are prepared. We must fight the ef- 
fort to militarize our minds and the minds 
of our children, to fill us full of the bigotry 
of nationalism in peace times, which is an 
hypertrophy of the patriotic organs. We 
must never make military obedience the 
habit of our bodies, nor war the habit of our 
thoughts. For though we may be lost after 
the declaration of it, our united power can 
many a time put off the day. 

If the German Socialists had refused to 
vote the great war loan in the peace of 
the winter of 1914, it is barely possible that 
no European war could have occurred. 
Then, and not in August, the politicians of 



134 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

the party failed of the conduct that we 
might reasonably demand of them. The 
Frenchmen were fighting the three-year 
law; it was theirs to fight "Preparedness." 
We ought to make sure that no such be- 
trayal of the international hope shall occur, 
if we have power to stop it, in this coun- 
try.* 

And then we ought to throw our best 
help into the bourgeois ^movements for inter- 
national federation. It is evident now that 
wars between the great nations are detri- 
mental to the larger interests of capital. As 
combination has proven profitable in private 
business, it will prove profitable in national 
enterprise. And we need only encourage the 
powers that already control our destinies, 
and show them the way, to make wars un- 
likely and unnatural. As Karl Kautsky 
says,f "Every far-sighted capitalist must 
call out to his associates: 'Capitalists of all 

* Those American Socialists who denounced the German poli- 
ticians as traitors for voting the war-loan, and yet are now advo- 
cating, or condoning, increased "Preparedness" in this country, are 
in a position they can never before the eyes of truth defend. 

t Paraphrasing the famous cry of Karl Marx in the Communist 
Manifesto — a cry which was the motto of the Socialist International: 
"Workers of all countries, unite!" 



WAR PSYCHOLOGY 135 

countries unite!' " We should join our 
voices in that call. And then while these 
capitalists, as a matter of Christianity and 
good business, abolish war, we can the more 
assiduously attend to our gentle crime of 
abolishing capitalism. 

And finally, with somewhat chastened un- 
derstanding, we must organize the interna- 
tional anew. For it is important that the 
working people of the different countries 
should co-operate in peace to check the mili- 
tarism of their governments. It is impor- 
tant that they should unite for the wage- 
struggle in proportion as their employers 
unite for international business. Every ar- 
gument for industrial unionism is an argu- 
ment for the international. It need not 
dampen our zeal to remember that war is a 
universal madness, which when it hits us we 
are lost. This ought to stimulate our will to 
build a structure that can help to stave it 
off. 

There may, indeed, be a more heroic des- 
tiny for the international in some countries. 



136 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

Those bourgeois pacifists may move too 
slow. The day may come when a civil war 
of labor against the tyranny of capital is 
itself so ready to break that the declaration 
of a foreign war will start it. In that happy 
accident our hopes of labor's pacifism could 
be realized. For though understanding and 
deliberate purpose can hardly check the 
patriotic stampede, a stampede in the op- 
posite direction might check it. All those 
loyal belligerent emotions might be caught 
off in a fight, and that rather intellectual 
entity, the working class, acquire more defi- 
nition and more force upon our instincts 
than even the nation has in danger. But 
this would be revolution rather than inter- 
national solidarity, and to me it seems more 
remote than that federation of the commer- 
cial nations which will make great wars im- 
probable. At any rate until that day of 
revolution, we shall do well to recognize that 
war has us in a strangle grip through the 
misfortune of our heredity, and our single 
effort must be directed to preventing its 



WAR PSYCHOLOGY 137 

very appearance upon the horizon. United 
anti-militarism and Federation of the Bour- 
geois States should be the rally-call of the 
new international. 



PACIFISTS 

THE worst thing about war is that 
everybody thinks about it. We are so 
full of fight that a fight absorbs our attention 
before everything. From the standpoint of 
the life and progress of the whole world, 
international wars are, to say the least, fu- 
tile episodes; and yet they fill our histories, 
and while they are in progress every other 
enterprise of mankind suspends. 

That is the reason why every one who is 
deeply interested in some enterprise of man- 
kind hates war. Not alone is war bloody 
and a denial of life — but war is a negative 
thing practically, it is an obstacle, a waste 
of heroism. The people who implacably op- 
pose war — call them pacifists if you must — 
are those who have something great that 
they wish to achieve with mankind. 

It may be that the thing they wish to 
138 



PACIFISTS 139 

achieve can be won only by fighting. (It 
may be that democracy can be won only by 
fighting.) They will not be averse to such 
fighting, for they are not excessively pacific. 
But they are averse to fighting for a nega- 
tive result, or an abstraction, as the soldiers 
do. They have found within their nation, or 
interpenetrating all nations, a more absorb- 
ing thing to fight for. They do not wish 
to be called off by war. 



TWO KINDS OF WAR 

\ \ J AR is beautiful. It is most beautiful 
» ^ to the savage who is naked of moral 
or intellectual trammels, and to whom the 
organic shock of bloodshed is not sickening. 
But even to the refined, and especially to the 
godly, war has a mighty attraction. The 
hymns and litanies of the churches are full 
of blood. All poetry and eloquence is alive 
with the rumors of battle. And there is 
hardly a breast too chilly to be stirred by 
the fife and drum and the thundering feet 
of millions that go forth to die for the na- 
tion's honor. 

To acknowledge that war is beautiful, and 
especially beautiful to those who merely im- 
agine it, is preliminary to a true estimation 
of its worth. For it is only because they 
confuse beauty with moral value that right- 
eous people are able to discuss so com- 

140 



TWO KINDS OF WAR 141 

placently the proper occasions and suitable 
proprieties of a thing that is murder. Only 
so can they decide that "a war of national 
honor" is the most righteous of all. It is 
the most beautiful of all. It is indeed a war 
between, or in the defense of, two abstract 
ideas. For nations do not exist except in 
the mouths and minds of those who name 
them. What really exists is the people, and 
they exist individually, and individually they 
have no quarrel with each other. They fight 
in the interest of a beautiful idea merely, 
and it is this that gives aesthetic value to the 
intellectually absurd and morally disgusting 
corruption that they make upon the earth. 
They are justified, in the minds of these 
righteous ones, by a certain glorious aspect 
that their enterprise has for the imagination. 
But if we mention to these same righteous 
a war that is morally necessary, a war that 
has a great prize in view, human liberty, 
namely, and the right to live and bear chil- 
dren, but which even if it had no affirmative 
end whatever and were only a war of de- 



142 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

fence against exploitation, has every moral 
sanction conceivable — if we say "Class 
War" to them, their recoil is full of hot in- 
dignation. A class-war is not beautiful. It 
does not trail after it the glamours of poetry 
and art. It is not aristocratic, not noble in 
the feudal character of that word. It is, in- 
deed, a stern, desperate, dirty, inglorious 
and therefore supremely heroic struggle to- 
ward a most real end. Such a war seems 
to appeal only to those whose morality has 
passed beyond the righteous stage, where 
aesthetic attractions and old tribal instincts 
are called "conscience." It appeals to those 
who have learned that moral judgment is 
an intelligent estimation of future values. 

We send our moral warriors to jail, but 
our aesthetic murderers and advocates of 
murder we extol and send up to the legis- 
lature. We give patriotism, or devotion to 
an insubstantial idea, a highest seat among 
the virtues. But class-conscious solidarity, 
the spirit of self-sacrifice in the cause of liv- 
ing flesh and blood that suffers and aspires 



TWO KINDS OF WAR 143 

— that we rate with treachery and treason 
among the sins of hell. 

In quiet reason we ought to reverse this 
position. If we are going to admire murder, 
we ought to admire the murders that are 
directed to some intelligible gain. And 
though it is more hopeful that we shall cease 
to admire murder altogether, still in the in- 
terval we might learn to say, "Let us have 
peace — but if there shall be war, let it be a 
war not of nation against nation, but of men 
against men, struggling to some real end." 

It is more than a coincidence that Thomas 
Jefferson, our first great advocate of inter- 
national peace, was also our first advocate 
of internal struggle. We are not apprised 
in the text-books, nor yet in the campaign 
books of our day, that Thomas Jefferson 
said, "A little rebellion now and then is a 
good thing. . . . God forbid that we should 
ever be twenty years without such a rebel- 
lion." But that is a brave saying to remem- 
ber. 



THE UNINTERESTING WAR 

A NEWS STORY FROM EUROPE 

THE principal impression I bring from 
Europe is that the war is not interest- 
ing. I had felt an element of strain in all 
the correspondence we were served with ; un- 
consciously I knew that as a drama the 
world war was not fulfilling journalistic ex- 
pectations. But until I got near and saw 
the disillusioned millions reading their mo- 
notonous little communiques every after- 
noon, and trying to find food for passion in 
the fact that this or that number of yards 
was gained or lost on a five-hundred-mile 
front, and a daily five thousand or more un- 
distinguished heroes killed gaining or losing 
it, I did not realize to what depths of weari- 
ness the course of European history had 
sunk. 

This article was written after a visit to Europe in June and 
July, 191 5. 

144 



THE UNINTERESTING WAR 145 

Battle used to be a word to rouse the 
blood with. A charge of bayonets, the bom- 
bardment of a city, the assault with hand 
grenades, the desperate encounter of gigan- 
tic armies — these were things that left a date 
and monument. War had black and crim- 
son moments hung with fate. 

Here the battle, charge, bombardment, 
hand-to-hand encounter, all the crisis and 
catastrophe, everything in war that gave an 
eminence of meaning to some phase or in- 
stant of it, is dissolved and run together 
in untold unapprehended quantities, spread 
over a space that cannot be brought into 
the imagination, and kept flowing through 
time in an absolutely uninterrupted mo- 
notony of noise and carnage. 

They shoot and kill five thousand French- 
men every day. They shoot more Germans, 
and still more Russians. All these men die 
in bombardments, battles, assaults, recon- 
noitres, charges, that old-fashioned historians 
would pore over and detail with expert de- 
light. But when there is an absolute con- 



146 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

tinuum of such things all over a continent 
for a year, and substantially nothing lost or 
gained on either side, how can you find any- 
thing to call interesting, and when you do 
find it how can you tell it from the rest? 

It is startling, and indeed appalling, to 
have a ton of metal dropped on you from 
twenty-six miles away after describing a tra- 
jectory seven miles high. It has a flavor 
of the gigantic miraculous — it suggests the 
Hippodrome. But as a mode of human 
conflict it lacks the dramatic elements of a 
street-corner fist-fight. 

One newspaper story of this war has made 
a genuine sensation, and that is Will Irwin's 
account of the battle of Ypres, which has en- 
deared him to the heart of the British Island 
forever. And Will Irwin deserves all the 
fame he got, for he made the battle of Ypres. 
Considered by old-fashioned standards of 
war correspondence, it was not a brilliant 
feat to go over there two months late and be 
the first one to find out there had been a bat- 
tle involving hundreds of thousands of men 



THE UNINTERESTING WAR 147 

and marking a crisis in the history of four 
nations. Formerly we should have thought 
this was a little slow. But actually it took 
something better than a journalist to do it, 
because it was an act of creative imagina- 
tion. Will Irwin had to go in and see that 
battle, as a single entity, in the middle of an 
absolutely fluid mass of warfare in which 
nobody had been able to see anything but 
his own gun before. The battle was there 
in all truth, and so are any million of other 
battles, but you'll never hear of them, be- 
cause, generally speaking, they are too com- 
mon to be worth polishing out. 

I do not know how they feel at the front. 
One man told me the last tiling they ever 
think about, or talk about, is the war. But 
I have a distinct impression that the people 
who are not at the front, or whose loves are 
not at the front, are dull about it. 

Even in France this is true, though the 
French are fighting in full faith that they 
are saving their country from the pos- 
session of barbarian hordes, and though 



V 



148 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 
r 

there is no murmur of reluctance. The war 
is to the French simply inevitable — a dull 
job as well as a tragic, but a job they will do, 
and are doing, to the gods' taste. 

Perhaps some of them were glad to fight 
in the beginning — the old inherited instinct 
is so strong. The Italians are still in that 
mood. In Paris, whenever a group of them 
are accepted for enlistment by their consul, 
they hire a taxicab and a girl, and decorate 
them with flags, and sail along the Boule- 
vards yelling and arm-waving in that rather 
surprising extreme of glee. The instinct of 
belligerence is strong in all the European 
peoples. They love to fight. But France 
has had time to learn that this is not a fight, 
this killing industry, and lier will to it is 
disillusioned. 

I never saw a sadder thing than those 
troops of young new soldiers leaving the 
caserne opposite my window, starting off 
with some small plaudits and some tears 
from those that love them, each a flower in 
the muzzle of his gun — but O, so serious! 



THE UNINTERESTING WAR 149 

I saw them three miles out, too, the flowers 
fading then, or fallen, and solemnly unwel- 
come business written in the eyes of every 
soldier. That is what the war is, as I saw 
it, to all France. 

And this disillusionment, this want of in- 
terest, is much more evident in England, al- 
though England has but one foot in the 
war. London is completely papered with 
unconvincing posters telling England's sons 
of the glories of military service. The dull- 
est would answer: "You protest too much." 
These posters are most of them childish and 
what we call "obvious," as though they were 
contrived by an amateur advertising man 
trying to sell a poor product. "It is better 
to face bullets at the front than be blown up 
by a Zeppelin at home," seemed to me the 
most doubtful. 

"Who dies if England lives?" 

"Young men of Britain, the Germans said 
you were not in earnest — give them the lie!" 

"Play'the greater game — join the football 
battalion!" 



150 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

"Women of Britain, say 'GoT " 

And then that little patriotic strip which 
reads : 

"It is YOUR duty to enlist!" 

It is pasted on the wind-shield of every 
taxicab in London, and behind it is to be 
found the huskiest, heartiest big piece of sol- 
dier-meat that ever escaped from an army! 

"It is your duty to enlist !" 

England is having a hard time. She will 
see conscription if the war lasts. 

No doubt the German state is fight- 
ing in a relatively exalte condition, which in- 
fects the great number of her people. But 
I believe the excited and romantic interest 
of men in the fortunes of war, as it once ex- 
isted, is little more active there than else- 
where. 

When we used to kill a bull on the farm, it 
was a great thing. John would go and put 
the head on the sledge-hammer and get his 
coat off, and the bull would be led into the 
barn by the nose and tied two ways, and 
everybody was both sad and breathless. 



THE UNINTERESTING WAR 151 

( This is not a pleasant simile, but it is true. ) 
When you go into the beef factories in Chi- 
cago and see them drive steers up into a 
narrow chute by the five thousand, and a 
man on a platform drops his hammer every 
so many seconds, and the steers roll out to 
be switched away, and shoved along, like 
mere material — why, the business of killing 
a bull loses every bit of drastic quality it 
had. 

In Paris I found myself more inter- 
ested in the relics of the Napoleonic Wars 
and the revolution, than I was in the daily 
reports of the final military climax of all 
European history, which was in suspension 
not a hundred miles away. And I am not 
an archeologist. 

It seemed that either the French or Ger- 
mans could break through the line anywhere 
for a gain of a mile or so, by massing enough 
men for the sacrifice, but that Germany 
could not afford it while she was attacking 
Russia, and the Allies thought it was not 
worth while. They could gain more by just 



152 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

letting the armies steadily slaughter each 
other in equal quantities all along the line, 
because in the long run there are more Allies 
than there are Germans. Certainly nothing 
sportsmanlike in that! But what can you 
do? This war has no more sport in it than 
it has dramatic action. It is merely a rou- 
tine businesslike killing and salting down of 
the younger men of each country involved — 
twenty thousand a day, perhaps, all told. 

I am not doing justice to the submarines. 
I suppose that "potting" ocean liners from a 
submerged and highly delicate war canoe 
several hundred miles from home in hostile 
waters, is a way to spend one's leisure that 
might be called princely sport. And as for 
the fishing expeditions — I learn that 32,000 
kinds of hook and bait have been suggested 
to the British Government, and I found the 
island literally breathing with rumors of 
what is happening to those "tin fish" about 
the shores of England. If the people who 
are on these expeditions love them as much 
as the people who stay at home and tell you 



THE UNINTERESTING WAR 153 

all about it, there could be no sadder victory 
than to deprive them of their sport. It is 
the only thing in all the war that England 
has a bit of her old gallant bellicose taste 
for. 

But, again, I do injustice to the aeroplane. 
A man told me about standing in a German 
field where a gun on an automobile was 
trying to bring down a French aeroplane 
five miles away. The gun was firing shells, 
and you could see the little puff of white 
smoke where the shell would crack in the 
vicinity of that soaring bird. Sometimes 
the shell would miss it by two miles. The 
man who told me this was a neutral — one 
of those neutrals who favor the Allies. But 
he told me that his instinctive zeal to see 
that bird-of-prey winged in mid-air at that 
distance was so great that after the shooting 
was over he could hardly hold himself up. 
So there is another grand sport the world 
has found. 

When the Zeppelins appear over Paris 
the entire fire department turns loose and 



154 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

careers through the black streets, tooting 
horns and yelling to the people to dive for 
their cellars. And with one accord the peo- 
ple rush to the streets, and out into the open 
squares, where they can get a good view of 
the fun. It is always a black night, and 
startling searchlights play back and forth 
on the clouds, and heaven is bombarded with 
shrapnel from all the high domes of the city. 
It is their one great taste of adventurous 
war, and the Parisians love it. They call it 
"Taube Day." No wonder, for it flashes a 
little of the old color of risky and romantic 
life across a dull, long, weary labor of death. 

There is little "risk" for the French sol- 
dier. He goes to the front expecting to be 
shot, and his family mourns him more or less, 
as soon as he is gone. There's always the 
hope, of course, that only a part of him will 
be shot off, and he will come back, and sit 
around, and be there for a little lifetime 
afterwards. 

I went through the American Red Cross 
Hospital in Paris — a strict, clean, sunny, 



THE UNINTERESTING WAR 155 

up-to-date, but very terrible place — a place 
conducted ( if a swift impression did not mis- 
lead me) by the transient or expatriated 
snobs of American society in Paris. I was 
informed by my gracious guide that all the 
young men who run automobiles for the hos- 
pital are gentlemen ! And when I took that 
rather quietly, "You understand they are 
real men, young men — gentlemen!" 

"And there is always a lady present in 
each room all day!" 

The effort of a true American aristocrat 
to signify the United States peerage, al- 
though the language has no word that does 
not hold a vulgar reference to the real basis 
of caste, is always amusing. But here espe- 
cially, because the peerage is actually doing 
work. And one must have a subtle grasp of 
history, or etiquette, to know that work 
which has to do with war, is honorific, and 
does not soil the hands of noblemen like use- 
ful labor. 

You can see here in this hospital, with 
its afternoon teas for the elite, and its young 



156 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

and elderly daughters of the first families 
of New York, patting the pallid cheeks of 
the French proletariat in humble solicitude 
— you can see a picture of what Veblen out- 
lines in the preface of his "Theory of the 
Leisure Class." The old, old title to aristoc- 
racy, prowess in the pursuits of war, mingles 
here — somewhat pitifully, to be sure, and as 
a poor relation — with the proper title of our 
time, hereditary wealth. And many a bitter 
old French revolutionary lies there, moving 
only with his eyes perhaps, but adequately 
saying all that you would have him say to 
that new-found solicitude. 

Such things are interesting, if you chance 
upon them. And the wounded, when they 
are picked out and separated from the daily 
pile, as here, and just the miracles of sur- 
viving life are shown to you, they too are 
all that war should be — a ghastly bludgeon 
shock of agony and human heroes laughing 
through their teeth, so that with horror at 
the gore and wonder at the soul of man, 
you want to fight or sing. I never saw that 



THE UNINTERESTING WAR 157 

soul of man before, and when I came away 
from there I wrote a poem. 



AT THE RED CROSS HOSPITAL 

To-day I saw a face — it was a beak, 

That peered with pale round yellow vapid 

eyes 
Above the bloody muck that had been lips 
And teeth and chin. A plodding doctor 

poured 
Some water through a rubber down a hole 
He made in that black bag of horny blood. 
The beak revived; it smiled — as chickens 

smile. 
The doctor hopes he'll find the man a tongue 
To brag with, and I hope he'll find it, too. 

But that is not the war — that is an iso- 
lated instant, which had horror in it for my 
eyes, who came there. When you kill some 
fifteen thousand youths a day, and rip the 
limbs or faces off how many thousands more 
nobody counts, the individual mangled hero 
is no longer characteristic. The color runs. 
There are no longer heroes — there is just 



158 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

the common fighting stuff of human nature, 
one continuous scrambled homogeneous jelly 
of that brave stuff. And that itself, when 
once it is apprehended and you have made 
yourself believe that you too are a part of 
it, is not profoundly stimulating. 

There are deeper reasons why this war is 
dull. One is that, although it may have 
mighty consequences for the world, they 
have no connection with its causes or the 
conscious purposes of those who fight. A 
greater or a less degree of freedom and 
democracy for Europe, will doubtless be the 
result of a signal victory for the Allies or 
for Germany. But that is in a manner acci- 
dental, a by-product. It is not what the war 
is about. 

I am not saying that anybody knows what 
it is about — that would be too interesting. 
"There is a thirty years' supply of causes of 
war on hand," as Kropotkin said some thir- 
ty years ago, and I suppose a dozen or two 
of these must have been at work. But what- 
ever started it, and whatever may result, 



THE UNINTERESTING WAR 159 

this war is not a war of people struggling 
against a tyrant for their liberty. It is a 
war of national invasion and defense — na- 
tionalism, the most banal of stupid human 
idol-worships. And the fact that liberty is 
more or less at stake is adventitious. One 
has to be historical to see it. One has to 
know that Prussia's despotism was the iron 
heart of feudal things in Europe, that the 
German people, never having had their 
Bourgeois revolution, are peculiarly behind 
the march in political freedom, though they 
lead us in so much. Or one has to remind 
himself that there were, and are, at least four 
hundred thousand revolutionary socialists in 
Germany who opposed and still oppose their 
rulers' war; and that they form the nucleus 
of a future revolution, that will bring at least 
political liberty to the German people. And 
that revolution will come soon if their rulers 
fail in this foreign war, and late if they are 
too successful. That consideration makes us 
tense in awaiting the result, but it is not as 
though the war were being fought for that. 



160 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

Another consideration stirred me too in 
France, when I found myself travelling one 
day in the same coach with a royalist. We 
take the republican form of government so 
entirely for granted over here, where we 
never had any other form established, that 
we have small realization of the peril of reck- 
less little France, a republic there in the 
midst of royal Europe, with clericals and 
feudal reactionaries working in her own 
heart, ready to pounce the moment her rep- 
resentative political institutions prove their 
military weakness. A little while ago a 
caustic royalist wrote a book on "The French 
Republic Before Europe," in which he ridi- 
culed the figure France has cut among the 
nations with her changing ministers and 
fickle foreign policies. He quoted and made 
more than much of a saying by Anatole 
France, "We have no foreign policy, and we 
never can have one." To this book the So- 
cialist leader, Marcel Sembat, replied with 
another, entitled, "Faites un Roi si non 
Faites la Paix." Establish peace or else es- 



THE UNINTERESTING WAR 161 

tablish a king — granting as an argument for 
internationalism, the royalist contention that 
a French republic cannot conduct war and 
military diplomacy in Europe. The titles 
of those books give some suggestion of a 
state of things in France that we, her friends 
in another hemisphere, little appreciate. No 
one would say that royalty and the church 
will re-establish themselves if the republican 
army is defeated. But the fact that the 
army is republican, that Joffre is a rough- 
hearted democrat, that no anti-republican 
has a hand in this campaign, is the most vital 
fact of the war to the internal history of 
France. A brilliant record of her arms will 
set back the forces of feudal and clerical 
tyranny in France, as much as a victory of 
Prussian arms will set them forward in Ger- 
many.* 

But that is not what the soldiers fight for ; 
the passion of the war has none of that; 

* At the present date this brilliant record is so fully achieved, 
that we can afford, I think, to dismiss this point from our con- 
sideration. It should be borne in mind that this article was written 
in the summer of 19 15. 



162 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

that is an aside, a foot-note — till its own 
day comes. This is a war of nationalism. 

The only way for a citizen of the world to 
become deeply interested in such a war is to 
lay aside his judgment altogether and enter- 
tain wild and fearful prophecies, and see one 
side or the other as the center and the soul 
of all things divine and sure, and the other 
as barbarity unveiled. That I cannot do. I 
earnestly desire to see the Kaiser fail of vic- 
tory, and especially of victory over France. 
I desire this for other reasons than those 
rather technical revolutionary ones I have 
mentioned. I know, for instance, that 
France has not only freedom but the arts of 
life more nearly won than any other country 
of Europe. Her culture is one of superior 
happiness, the habits of her people are more 
poetic, they realize more, live more, and with 
all that they are more spontaneously intelli- 
gent than the Germans. They are at home 
among ideas. An American correspondent 
expresses surprise at hearing a Frenchman 
in Paris sav : 



THE UNINTERESTING WAR 163 

"I think the Germans are altogether right 
about the Lusitania. They do not put their 
case well, but their main position is unassail- 
able. In the present state of sea war they 
must sink on sight a ship loaded with enemy 
munitions." 

That did not surprise me at all, because it 
is quite the character of French people to 
abstract from their personal passions in mak- 
ing intellectual judgments. They have the 
rare gift of thinking with their minds. They 
feel with their hearts. And this is not the 
way of the Germans, as a glance at their 
great literature and philosophy, and their 
unlucky diplomacy reveals. If they knew 
how to use abstract ideas — which are the 
part of a discussion that is common to both 
parties — then they would "put their case 
well." 

And as for England — I know that Eng- 
land, though on the whole a land of snobs and 
servants, holds more people who stand up 
alone and unmolested, thinking and saying 
what they wish to think and say, than any 



164 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

other place on earth.* England has free- 
doms that France lacks. Her navalism is 
just as military as Germany's militarism, 
but its service is not compulsory. She has 
to pay her soldiers silver money. Yes — 
England has more of the liberty we love than 
Germany. 

And Russia — somehow Russia seems to 
have a great many people like the French. 
I think a Russian Czar will always have a 
good deal to do at home. At least Russia 
has had her revolution, though it failed, and 
feudalism is less solid there, exactly because 
it is not linked fast with industrial and scien- 
tific and social reform progress of the high- 
est kind, than it is in Germany. Russia is a 
vast quantity that, at the very worst, must 
appear in our calculations as unknown. 

In all these points, then, I agree with those 
who desire that if either side shall be signally 
defeated, it may be the Central Empires, t 

* For a mild corrective to these generalizations, I must refer the 
reader to my own essay, page 57, "On Characterizing Nations." 

t When this article was written my understanding of nationalism, 
and my sense of the dangers of victory or defeat for either side, 
were not mature. In "The Anti-German Hate" (p. i) I have ex- 
pressed a more deliberated opinion upon all these topics. 



THE UNINTERESTING WAR 165 

And, finally, I agree that the German war 
party played a larger part among those 
thirty available causes of war than any other. 
I think the immediate opposition of four or 
five hundred thousand German Socialists 
proves it.* Anti-militarism was far stronger 
in France than it was in Germany before the 
war — but in France there is hardly an anti- 
military murmur since the war began, where- 
as Germany has had her insurrectionists to 
suppress from the very beginning. That is 
more significant to me than all the many- 
colored diplomatic papers put together. 
And thus I am in accord, to some degree 
at least, with those who decry "German mili- 
tarism" as the arch-incendiary. f 

But does that commit me to a mono- 
mania? Must I turn my deliberated opin- 
ions and wishes into an absolute fixation 
which allows no judgments of degree? That 

* I derive these figures from the report of Frank Bohn, a Ger- 
man-American Socialist, who visited Germany in 1915, and talked 
with the leaders of all factions in the German party. 

1 1 have pointed out in "The Anti-German Hate, page seven, that 
although Germany did seem to supply more of the immediate 
causation of the war, England seemed to supply more of the remote 
causation, which was equally indispensable and equally effective. 



1W UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

is what the mood of war-times invariably 
demands. That is what public opinion in 
this country, and its leaders, have almost 
unanimously done. They have made a choice 
between two absolutes. It has never oc- 
curred to them that they had anything else 
to do. But why should we have anything to 
do with absolutes — in war any more than in 
religion? 

Because France is more advanced in lib- 
erty and realistic life than Germany, do we 
have to say that France is civilization and 
Germany is barbarism, and German victory 
would put out the light of naive idealism 
forever? I imagine that the civilization of 
France would conquer that of Germany, 
whether she were defeated at arms or not, be- 
cause of the greater degree of happiness and 
human fun there is in it. 

Because the French behave among ideas 
as among friends, while the Germans 
are prone to fall into soulful attitudes about 
them — do we have to conclude that truth, 



THE UNINTERESTING WAR l«f 

as well as liberty and life, are doomed if the 
Kaiser's army stays across the Rhine? 

Because Anglo-Saxon bullheads have a 
way of insisting on their individual rights 
that is foreign to the majority of the bull- 
headed Germans, do we have to think that 
the whole world is going to submit to the 
yoke of metaphysical paternalism if this 
war goes against the Allies? 

Because Germany's nationalism has bare- 
ly reached the age of puberty, and the older 
nations have passed that a little — do we 
have to think that all the world will be com- 
pelled to worship "The Fatherland" if the 
Allies do not reach Berlin? 

Because the Germans, being the invaders, 
were atrocious, do we have to blink the fact 
that every invader in all history has been 
atrocious, and the atrocities of certain Ger- 
man soldiers probably were no more nu- 
merous than ours would have been in like 
case? 

And even if the facts convince us that the 
German princes, more than any other factor, 



168 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 

were the immediate perpetrators of the war, 
need we ignore all the other factors, and need 
we lose our memory that it was the last 
chance of those princes ; that their power was 
already doomed by their own people ; that if 
the Allies succeed in driving them to their 
borders, and preventing the indemnities they 
count on, the German princes will probably 
never perpetrate war again? 

I think it must be a desire to become inter- 
ested, or rather the inability to stay out of a 
fight, that leads so many intelligent Ameri- 
cans to renounce all quantitative estimates, 
all judgments of degree, and make an abso- 
lute, on one side or the other, of the issue in 
this war. It is the one way to remain en- 
thusiastic about so stupid an affair. 

And even that way, the task grows more 
difficult with every month that passes. For 
time, it seems, is not going to make an ab- 
solute of the issue between the Germans 
and the Allies. It grows ever more likely 
that the war will see no signal victories. My 
visit to Europe has made me doubt exceed- 



THE UNINTERESTING WAR 169 

ingly whether the plain folks of Russia and 
France and England have enough enthusi- 
asm for this war to do much more than fight 
a draw with Germany. And, on the other 
hand, I do believe that England would sur- 
prise us all, and Germany not least, if she 
once got backed up upon her little island and 
began to fight. She would never quit. And 
that means that the Kaiser cannot win. 

So viewing it in the profoundest way I 
could, I failed of passionate interest in the 
European War. There is more for me in 
Mexico or Bayonne, or any of these bar- 
barous places where the people fight in bat- 
tles, and for something I can want. 













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